How to Develop Battery Storage in Emerging Markets - Ion Ventures

I'm your host, Ed Porter. Welcome back to transmission. Some countries never built landlines. They went straight to mobile. No legacy systems unwind. No sunk cost to protect. The same opportunity exists in battery energy storage. But getting capital to back it is another matter. As in Bali, co-founder and director at Ion Ventures works at that fault line, developing battery projects across markets at very different stages of readiness. This episode is about the gap between what's technically possible and the steps that grids are willing to take. If this episode gets you asking questions about battery storage developments, project pipelines, market structures, what bankability actually looks like in practice, then? Ko, Modo Energy's AI analyst is a great place to dig deeper. Link in the description now. Let's jump in. Hi and welcome to transmission. Thanks Ed. Great to be here. And as ever. Let's start off with what's one thing that people always get wrong about developing battery storage projects. With battery storage? I think one of the biggest challenges is you've got to almost decide what your end point is before you even start developing your battery. So I think the biggest challenge is, you know, to the extent there are parallels with other renewable energy assets, it's less about purely finding a piece of land, finding a grid connection. You have to also think about what you want that asset to do, what market it's plugging into, how it's going to operate, and essentially sort of work backwards from that endpoint and factor all of those considerations in from day one, which I think is a it's a slightly different approach to a traditional generator solar project, where it's a bit more straightforward to simply build it and connect it and then get paid to export. There's a lot more to think about in advance with the battery project, mostly because of how you actually operate it commercially. Yeah, the danger of going into like the real deep end. I think this is really important that where you add your battery to the system, what it's actually going to do to help balance the grid, all of that actually really matters. You can't just kind of connect it anywhere and just assume that the revenues will be good enough. Yeah, absolutely. And I think in part it's how you expect to generate revenue. In part it's how you think the market might evolve over time. You know, there's a lot of conversation right now in the UK and other markets of moving to longer duration systems. Plenty of early systems were designed as 1 or 2 hour systems. And actually now there's a real merit in looking at longer duration. But those are decisions you have to make from day one in order to be able to do it in real time once the asset is either into construction or operational. So you really need to be thinking quite long term about how you develop your potential project so that it can actually be adapted over time to changing market conditions. So you have that in your mind from day one. You then have land connection and you're thinking about bringing finance into these projects. When would you be able to say, yes, a project is ready to go, and when would it kind of be too early to really be talking about it publicly. Yeah, I think, um, I think our mantra is try not to be too public about what we're doing regardless. And I think that's because it is a long road to get from identifying a potential project to actually being realized, certainly ready to build. And lot goes on in the meantime, which can either stall it or potentially derail it altogether. I think we're all seeing evidence of that in the UK with connections reform and issues around planning that have happened through Covid, etc. so I think part of the challenge is understanding that you've got really good design principles, you've got a pretty big funnel and you're very realistic about how you progress projects from one stage to another, and you use that sort of, um, you know, banked experience of having delivered lots of projects historically to be able to say, you know, we think that these ones are likely to push forward. You then can, you know, apportion your effort, your resource, your development expenditure accordingly. And so that's how you sort of get to realize which projects are likely to be ready to build and in advance of that. To be honest, conversations with investors are probably things you need to be doing all the time. Um, and to the extent possible, giving the right, uh, potential partners sight of how you're progressing, um, so that they can be ready to move with you as your pipeline gets to a level of maturity that starts to require real conversation about about which ones are going to get invested into and constructed. So you're always saying with the financiers, it's not sort of there's a point in time and then it's ringing up the financiers and say, let's go. It's actually you need to be talking to them two years before saying, we're doing a load of these sites. There's a hundred of them. We expect X number will drop out. And when we come to you in a few years time, just be aware that the ten and 15 that we've got like and maybe I'll ask you that question of a hundred sites, like how many would you expect to get through to financing. Yeah. And look, it's probably not far off. I mean, I think when, uh, in the early days of this market specifically for, for UK BESS, um, conversion rate was probably 30–40%. It was quite high. It was relatively quick. You could get it ready to build site probably in a couple of years. I think as we've got closer to the current time and the way that connections reform has changed things, and certainly through the Covid and post-Covid period, that's extended in terms of time frame to probably three, four years overall and probability has dropped more towards sort of ten, 15% in reality, which means you have to do a lot of work to get a single project when you engage with investors. That's also a point where clarity is really important. You know, there's a distinction between what we say within our businesses sort of brag of what's versus real what's, and our focus is and what we think can be real, what's been delivered. And that's also about keeping that dialog open, keeping it realistic, and making sure that, you know, to the extent that you can control timelines, you, you know, you stick to them. So that's what I'm really excited about with this conversation is that on this podcast we've talked a lot about GB development, GB connections, reform in various guises. But your company. Ion Ventures do far more than just GB, and so I'm really interested to see how you see that development pipeline in other regions that you work in. Yeah, I think from the outset our view has been that there are some key fundamentals that they apply as a global part of the energy transition and the fact that there's been such a move towards, um, you know, deploying renewables at scale, um, around the world. And from our perspective, the UK market is fantastic because it's been very progressive. It's been highly innovative in in how it's unbundled the market, adopted new technologies and put in market mechanisms to support it as an experience base. That's really helpful for a developer like us. And our view has been right from the outset that there will be many other markets that will accelerate towards the same conditions over time, and most of them, certainly going back 7 or 8 years, were really at a point where there was a growing acknowledgment that renewables and renewables would feature in their energy mix. Um, but low adoption and our view is being, well, you could accelerate that if you could educate and start to deploy BESS alongside it on the basis that storage is sort of axiomatic to renewables, because if you're long renewables, from an investment point of view, you should be long storage, and the technical capability is really conducive to supporting how you would achieve more rollout and utilization of renewables. So with that in mind, and based on our existing relationships that we have from historic work that we've done, um, within the company, we felt that South East Asia was a market that was really attractive for us to get in early and, and to build our, our footprint over time. Okay. And for listeners, what does obviously Southeast Asia is quite a broad region. So sort of what specific countries. Yeah. So specifically we've narrowed that to what I would, you know, are termed Asean countries. And within that Malaysia, Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia have been the markets that we've selected. And that's for a range of reasons. There's different levels of maturity in terms of adoption of renewables. There's been different policy frameworks and there are different physical conditions that you have to work with. Indonesia and Philippines are very, um, islands. And so in that sense, there's huge opportunity for mini grids and remote location work. Whereas Malaysia, um, and, you know, to an extent is a much larger grid and more complete grid network, which, which is a bit more analogous to what we have here in the UK, for example. Okay. And the thing that you're sort of pushing off the network is, um, is that often sort of a, a diesel system or is it sort of coal, like what do those, what do those grids typically look like? There's actually a reasonable mix, but very fossil fuel dependent. Um, there tends to be a range of large scale coal and gas. There's also a lot of smaller scale heavy fuel oil and diesel generators. Um, and depending on which part of the system you're talking about, you would see, um, a tendency more towards diesel gen sets in islands and remote locations, and you see a tendency towards the much larger coal generators and the like in, uh, in more, um, sort of mature grid connected regions. And that's got to be a great story, right? The, the whole purpose, why a lot of people are in the sort of battery and renewable space is to try and move things like coal off the system. So working in those regions, you really feel like you get a one for one's the wrong wording, but do you feel like you get a direct benefit of, say, bringing solar and storage onto those grids? Yeah, I think, you know, as a as an organization, our view as Ion Ventures has really been, you know, the energy transition in and of itself is a is a is a really important, um, you know, topic that we need to grapple globally. Being able to contribute in that one way or another is something that we really wanted to, to be able to achieve. Um, specifically, we've got the technology to do it. How you align it to a market is the real challenge, and the need for it is very clear. I think the biggest opportunity is in, um, you know, displacement of that existing, but over time it's going to be growing demand because these are all fairly rapidly growing economies. GDP is growing. Electrification is growing. And therefore the sort of per capita use of energy, particularly electricity, is increasing quite quickly as well. So yes, one hand it's displacement of existing but it's also meeting future demand. And so there's two facets that we think is relevant. Coal unit might stay running. But instead of then having an additional coal unit you're saying actually that that that additional demand we can meet from solar and storage and then still run the existing fleet as is? Yeah, exactly. And and in some instances, some of those operational assets are contracted under very long term offtake agreements, sort of a classic thermal IPP type business model. And over time, the renewal of those contracts secures a smaller proportion of overall generation capacity. So there are moves already to try and rely less on some of those existing assets. And that gives you space then to supplement with renewables or to see how those assets can operate in a market and whether they are competitive versus newer technologies which are delivering against them in the same peak periods. Yeah. And for any listeners who were listening to Kennedy's episode on gas supplies globally, we talked about Pakistan and the solar and battery boom in Pakistan, and how one of the things that was sort of underappreciated on it was that the LNG contracts between, say, Qatar and Pakistan are sort of set in place. And so even though if you reduce the amount of gas that you're using, that might actually have some upstream effects, because you still might have to pay for some of that gas. So in some of these areas, it can be quite a complicated story to get everything unwound. Um, I do want to come back to this kind of concept of 100 sites, and I know you don't have 100 sites everywhere. Um, but in sort of Southeast Asia, do you feel like it's the early days of GB BESS or you're more around that sort of 30 to 40% success rate on projects when you when you start working on them? Or is it more towards the sort of GB today of, say 10%. No, I think it's I think it's like the early days, you know, the ability to identify what is a really good, um, site location and potential commercial rationale to deploy a project is actually very clear. The challenge is less about, I would think, the, um, the actual development of that project and designing it and sizing it appropriate to the opportunity. It's actually dealing with the offtake side of things and the commercialization of it, because, you know, where there is very clear demand and there's very clear evidence that you could benefit from having BESS or co-located solar battery projects. The challenge is, are those markets conducive to receiving those kind of electrons that are generated or services, because they've never really formed their market around them previously. They're used to straightforward bilateral offtake agreements. And generally speaking, um, BESS is something which can do an awful lot more than simply be contracted under some sort of bilateral agreement. And so that evolution is actually, I think, the thing which determines how we choose where to look at developing projects and which ones we think are likely to to come to fruition. Yeah. So we almost take it for granted. We have quite open markets, say in GB, and there's competition for every single half hour, every single hour and in different frequency response services. There's competition as well. In some of these markets. You're saying that actually you might be a large transmission, uh, connected generator and you might be under a 10 or 15 year contract to provide the same services for 10 or 15 years. And so there's just not that sort of space for other techs to come in and compete in the same way. Yeah. And I think that's that's definitely the historic norm. And if you look at certain markets, for example, like Philippines, um, albeit presently there is a, there is a slight postponement of of the western open market because of global geopolitical conditions. And, and the fact that that's led to huge price spikes in, in power pricing. There's been a push for more power to be traded in the wholesale markets. There's been a push to try and get net metering and to allow for both, um, you know, behind the meter, um, as well as front of meter generation assets to participate and to benefit from those, those price fluctuations. So I think if you look at Philippines, it's a pretty rapidly maturing market, which is a sort of a blend of where we are today in the UK and where, say, a market like Indonesia is, which is pretty much entirely bilateral long term agreements between a generator and the state. And so are you seeing that you're taking part in kind of these new markets that are more sort of competitive and flexible, or are you seeing that the model for some of these regions is kind of the old fashioned model, even though batteries are flexible? Uh, you're still going into like a five or a ten or a 15 year contract with the system operator. It tends to be the latter. And that's because the system operators and regulators haven't necessarily understood how to, um, um, incentivize or put in place, uh, either a contracting framework or to remove barriers in their existing regulatory frameworks that would otherwise allow batteries to connect and operate in a, let's say, a fully liberalized fashion. And that's not dissimilar to what we saw in the UK and other more mature markets as as people understood what they needed to do to facilitate the use of storage on the network. A lot of it was, you know, unexpected or unforeseen barriers that just needed to get taken away. So there is a progression on that front. I think we perhaps think that open and flexible markets are a great thing. If I swap out sort of, um, my Modo angle and I say, actually, I'm a financier. You tell me that actually it's not going to be a daily market or a half hourly market. It's going to be a 10 or 15 year contract. As a bank, I probably get quite excited about that. I probably quite like that. It's a it's a longer term contract. You do. And I think that that is one of the challenges around what I would call bankability and access to capital and actually real deployment of capital into these markets. So if you look at actual demand and growth, as I said earlier, there's huge demand growth. And there's no doubt that electrification is is, you know, very much happening and at speed, um, a lot of that electrification of transport cooling particularly and to an extent industrialization, therefore you have quite reliable off takers in the market. The first port of call, though, in these markets, tends to be less about what the specific project risk is. It tends to be what the country risk is. And oftentimes that's a that's an immediate barrier to entry, because a lot of institutional capital is linked to specific mandates. And those mandates have conditions around what level of country risk they're willing to be exposed to. And within that, what, um, you know, what the what classification of country, whether it's OECD or non OECD, for example, that they might deploy to. So the first challenge is who's actually able to invest in any of those countries by virtue of their investment mandate. That's before you get to the actual project risk. Okay. And would you say that the banks are sort of too conservative on these regions, or are there sort of specific banks that are specialists? There are definitely some who are specialist. I think the big challenge here is that there is a level of conservatism which is borne of, you know, some of it regulatory constraint. For example, FCA, if you're an FCA regulated entity out of London, um, the rules there dictate that it's very challenging for you to invest at a project finance level into any project in a country that falls below a certain investment grade, and that's just a default factor of the the way that the regulatory frameworks we have today operate. And that can be quite challenging for investment institutions that want to invest in these territories. So they then have to think of other ways of either, um, clubbing in with development banks or, you know, multilateral development banks, or they have to look at other concessional financing type processes, which makes it a bit more complex and harder to deploy at scale, where you've got private entities or private institutional investors that are actively engaged in those markets. What they tend to look for, um, is scale, and that's a classic catch 22, which is, you know, they would like to deploy, you know, 50, 100 million. They would like projects to be 100 plus megawatts, you know, moving towards gigawatts in terms of scale, but in a marketplace where you are effectively nascent and building from the ground up, it's quite challenging to do that even in aggregate, let alone in individual projects. And I think that's another part of the bankability challenge, which, you know, needs a layer of what I would call educated, um, smaller ticket size investors that see the opportunity, see the pathway to achieving scale and good returns, and are willing to engage early and take that long term investment decision. Yeah, it's really interesting. I was I was keen to ask about like when does it change? Like does it, does it sort of tip over at some point? And I guess the scale that you're talking about here, you're not talking about sort of tens or hundreds of megawatts, you're probably talking about a battery storage investment that gets towards gigawatts for these regions. For some, for some groups, that's the objective. Yeah. And you know, the challenge again is, you know, what's the need versus what's possible today. The need is clear. The long term market scale is going to be significant. It's going to be into gigawatts and tens of gigawatts. But you have to start with something that is at the smaller end, simply because, you know, to actually get a counterparty agreement in place for the local market, off takers to be comfortable, for local regulators to be comfortable, you probably aren't going to be delivering a, you know, 2 or 300 megawatt project straight away. There's going to be a level of building up to that with smaller, you know, maybe sub 50, even sub 20 megawatt projects and that and those are the iterative steps that we're going through at the moment. It feels like if you look at the battery space on the outside, often you just see the the mega projects that are hitting the news, the one gigawatt, four gigawatt hours, maybe a lot of those in GB, a lot of those in Germany, and a lot, certainly a lot in the US, particularly on co-location. Um, and then you think, well, wouldn't it be nice if we have the blueprint, we can clearly make these systems? Can't we just sort of plonk one of these down in some region? And I think what you're saying is really important, which is actually for some of these regions, we you kind of still have to move through these kind of stage gates to get people comfortable, because people just don't want to make a big, a big leap all in one go. That's exactly right. I think the big leap is is very challenging. There are probably a few educated investors out there that have done enough in other markets, have a mandate to be in these, um, you know, Southeast Asian and other rapidly growing marketplaces who will potentially take a, you know, a very educated decision on 1 or 2 mega projects. And they'll see. But at a fundamental level, you have to also have done the same work that we do in the UK, which is to look at location, to look at grid, to look at what you could actually physically locate. You know, there are there are all kinds of constraints that you need to think about, which are less about the appetite or the potential scale of the market, but are just down to project fundamentals. What can be developed? Where can it be located and can it be accommodated on the grid network? And those are the other parts which you have to marry up. As we as we develop projects that can reach bankability I think it's a it's a fascinating point as well on um, sort of electrically qualified people who can then bring these projects forward. So in GB we have a sort of record of delivering projects. And in Europe now there is also that record. In some regions that record is going to become very strained very quickly as we try and move faster than ever before, which means that all of our resource kind of gets absorbed, and maybe we can't move as fast as we would like to, but in some of the sort of regions that haven't had those sort of stage gates, how do you find working with those groups in terms of the sort of, um, depth of electrically qualified people to bring some of these projects to life? There's two aspects to that. So on one hand, um, you know, they haven't had the direct exposure that, uh, you know, of a UK market or a German market and that level of maturity. But they are proactive in trying to identify what does the system of the future look like, and how can they start to implement that in their own countries. And a case in point, I suppose it's a bit analogous to the telco sector, where, you know, if you look at the Asean countries, they've all got fantastic mobile coverage, um, in pretty remote locations. There's not much of a historic fixed line, you know, telephone dependency. And I think it's a similar opportunity set within the grid, which is how can they almost leapfrog to design grid 2.0, which is based around adopting these technologies, you know, renewables, storage, um, flexibility at the heart of it, wrapping the right mechanisms for market access and policy frameworks to support that. And there's lots of people who are working towards it. As with everything, there's a degree of inertia. There are lots of market participants and operators who they've spent their entire careers in a very straightforward thermal baseload environment, and some of these changes are quite challenging for them to come to terms with. But there is definitely a movement in the direction to try and take the best of other markets, and I think that's one of the that's one of the exciting things. It can be frustrating because it doesn't necessarily happen in the time frame that we would like, but I do see a direction of travel that way. So one question that seems sort of, um, we're really good to ask would be, let's say that, uh, one of these countries, one of these grids come to you and they say, oh, well, look, we've seen what GB have done really well or we've seen what Germany have done really well, and we're very excited about adding storage to our network. And we think that the tech is good enough to do this. And we think we're about to hit this inflection point and we'd like to go to 3 or 4 or five gigawatts. What would you what would you say to you? Obviously you've seen a lot of GB, right? What would you say to them to be. How do you actually pave the way for this to happen? What's the advice you'd give them. Yeah, I mean, interestingly, we we were involved a few years ago in a, in a European Commission funded project in Bangladesh, which was to deliver on a on a cooperation with the Bangladesh government to derive their roadmap for energy out to, I think, 2040. And our contribution was specifically on energy storage and how it could fit into that roadmap and where it might be useful in the context of what Bangladesh was, was looking in terms of future planning. And from that, it is very evident that there are lots of ways in which you can engage top down, get people to understand that there's a clear role for it, and identify where some of those barriers are. And what we found there was that actually going through with worked examples was really helpful. So partly it's the techno economic evaluation of how the current system is working. So Bangladesh has always been very reliant on natural gas and interconnectors. Natural gas, a huge proportion of it is bought. Spot certainly used to be. And that is a problem especially when you're in a highly volatile, Um, you know, fossil fuel price world. Um, and it was relatively unreliable at key points in time because they didn't have the right transmission infrastructure in all parts of the country. And so when you then start with that as your your opening position, you start to see where areas of the country are, are suffering detrimentally under brownouts, blackouts or high cost electricity. So that immediately gives you the ability to point to places where if you are able to implement flexibility, you can avoid huge transmission reinforcement costs and timeframes to achieve it. You can identify places where storage could immediately, uh, alleviate some of the impacts of peak time. Uh, both in terms of lack of reliability but also very expensive pricing. Um, and, you know, effectively produce really good economic benefit, but also technically a solution that can be realized in a short space of time. Say 2 to 4 years as opposed to 10 to 12. If you're looking at, you know, transmission reinforcement or a new LNG plant in order to be able to onshore more, more LNG from other markets. So specifically in Bangladesh, we followed that all the way through to being able to say, here are some worked examples of where energy storage on your network can benefit. And through engagement with the government at the time and the Energy Commission and the Power Board, we were able to identify where and why they should look at adopting storage. Now it's still working its way through, but I think you can do that through almost semi consultative engagement. And that's really our approach in other markets as well is, you know, even as a minnow, how do you have those conversations? How do you see where you can add some value based on the technical solution, but then link it back to something that commercially makes sense for them to try and implement? I think it's just such a fascinating story, right? If you if you take sort of the grid 1.0 and the grid 2.0, so the 1.0 is the sort of transmission system of old and how many of the sort of Western developed grids have worked. And 2.0 is this kind of new grid coming through where we don't necessarily think transmission first? Um, the bit that I think is really exciting for me is that those older fashioned grids would look at a problem like constraints and would say, oh, well, when the sort of, uh, discounted cash flow of constraints over 20 years adds up to more than the cost of building out my network connection, I will build a new 400 kV, and that shall be built over 11 or 13 years. And that is kind of the status quo and sort of I've missed if I've misrepresented transmission networks, please correct me, please, please do get in touch and tell me I'm wrong. But in grid 2.0, the whole framing of what you said was totally different, which is there are brownouts, there are blackouts, there are high price periods. Um, so actually, what could we do in the next few years to put storage on those particular parts of the network and try to resolve this problem in a way that would just be sort of almost a decade before some of the sort of grid 1.0, um, would even be getting ready to solve it. Yeah, absolutely. And and I think it does present that level of opportunity as you've articulated it, the decentralized approach, thinking bottom up as much as top down is really important. And I think when people start to realize and see how that can, um, actually allow them to achieve the things they want. That's a really important start. You know, there are lots of other parts on the network where you could benefit from, you know, being able to actually monitor your assets properly, monitor your utilization of existing infrastructure. You know, there's more headroom allocation you could probably adopt. These are all other things that network operators could probably move to. But I think that simple process of saying, how do we look at what technology can deliver for us today in a short timeline? How do we find locations where it can really demonstrate high value in a short space of time? That, for me has got to be the starting point and then it builds momentum from there. I'm fascinated on like the scale that you would see storage in Bangladesh, like would you see sort of every home having its own storage unit and be sort of absolutely from the bottom up and sort of total decentralized markets. Every home has its own. Or do you see like a 50 megawatt, 100 megawatt unit having, um, some sort of conventional advantages over that sort of distribution? I mean, there's there is potential that the home system may become a big part of the, of the overall kind of network development over time. That's not really our area. You know, we really want to look at grid connected assets. And so, you know, we're looking at those 50–100 or higher capacity systems where you're looking at for six hour duration, um, you know, deployments that can really start to deliver value at a network level. Um, I think we will see a natural evolution in certain markets where if you've got a high, you know, rollout of rooftop solar, you'll start to see more, um, behind the meter batteries and that can support a more flexible, um, you know, let's call it almost, uh, supply side. Sorry, a demand side change in how the system operates, but I think we're a long way off from that being the case in markets like Bangladesh. I think generally speaking, if people implement it for home, use it so that they don't have to fire up the existing diesel gen sets that they currently own, and they would rather use a home solar and battery system because it's going to be lower cost and more reliable when the grid isn't delivering. I think our our view is really focused on the grid piece and see if we can we can raise the bar there because that's that's where we sort of strategically have decided to focus. Okay, I have two more. Two more questions for you. Um, one, I feel like I'm leading the witness slightly to say that because grid connections is the everywhere problem. Um, and that's my sort of own bias because of the markets that I see will have good connection problems. Do you see that in some of these more nascent regions? Um, yes and no. And it's a and the reason for that is, I think, the opportunity to end up in a position like, say, for example, the UK is very clearly there, you know, and that's based on the fact that, as I said before, a lot of these systems are still thermal baseload, sort of centrally located, pushing out through transmission infrastructure. But there are a lot of people who are interested in doing more. The bottom up decentralized approach, and I think if the right decisions are made in a timely fashion, it's entirely avoidable that you get this sort of grid crunch because you will not be, um, driving, um, let's say, towards curtailment and obvious challenges with connecting in the way that UK markets have. So part of that is don't over saturate with renewables too quickly without in parallel deploying storage and flexibility. And I think that's clearly essential. I think markets are understanding that. And it's sort of almost, um, normal that if you're doing solar, it's going to be co-located with storage now and you can almost deliver shaped dispatch, which is more amenable on the network side to receive that without the level of curtailment. Um, and I think the pure role of storage at a network level is increasingly understood. So I think the the message is, is is clearly understood. It's how quickly that they can adapt to accommodate that so that they avoid going so far down the route of long queues, curtailment, um, and therefore, um, a level of uncertainty about how you can modify the grid in time. I think that's avoidable, but it needs action now. Okay. So if you just go into like one, one leg of the chair effectively, which is, you know, renewable standalone, you're going to have problems. But if you're going into renewables as well as storage then you're starting to get like a more balanced system. Exactly. Okay. Okay. And onto my final question, which is a modo classic. So, um, what is a contrarian view about energy markets that you hold? So investors probably won't like this too much, particularly if you're invested in existing thermal generation assets. I think we see indications in the UK, for example, about things like skip rates around the marginal price being set by gas. I think these are all elements within a broader theme. As I mentioned before, both, you know, whether it's the UK or the more international markets we're looking at. There's a huge amount of incumbent thermal generation that is regardless of its overall price and delivered cost, some of which is still taxpayer funded because it's a pass through rate on underlying fuel. Um, those contracts have historically been seen as bulletproof. I think there's a real, um, rationale, particularly under the present conditions, in pushing for a level of reform which changes merit order and starts to actively incentivize displacing that existing contractual, um, thermal power for clean power. And that doesn't mean that the asset owner is going to ultimately have no capacity to deliver. But if you can incentivize them to start delivering renewables instead of they're they're thermal based, um, you know, export. I think that would be something that would be quite, quite useful in accelerating energy transition. But the controversy is you start to unwind existing contracts, which people don't like. But I think on the basis of we've got an objective which is to decarbonize networks, and we would like to try and give reliable, low cost electricity. That would be my approach if if it were, you know, someone was willing to undertake it. Yeah, it's going to be that is super controversial because there are so many sort of, um, uh, projects that are almost locked in on those, on, on, on those pathways. But I think a great contrarian view, because it will be truly contrary to what many people are invested in for GB as. And thank you very much for coming on. You've been a great guest and look forward to hearing about how your projects in those developing regions come along. Thanks, Ed. It's been great to be here.