Hydropower and long-duration energy storage with Kate Gilmartin (CEO @ The British Hydropower Association)

That two gigawatt of hydropower, that fleet, much of it was built, you know, over fifty, sixty years ago, and it's been working hard. Yeah. I call it the the workhorse of renewables because it's been powering decade after decade for it's it's, you know, it's basically seen the rise and fall of coal, nuclear, and now gas, and it's still generating there in the background. So these have these assets have real longevity. It's not gonna wanna cycle the way a battery does.

So it's gonna be operationally very different to batteries, and it needs to be operationally different because it's a turbine. I think that's the difference. We have to look at how they're gonna operate and how they're gonna operate differently and how they're gonna get their revenue streams. We need a lot of storage.

So I think there's room for for everything, but we definitely need to see pumped storage hydro coming online. These are big assets. They're big infrastructure assets. They need that support in terms of the cabin floor mechanism.

But once they're on the system, they're good for many, many years, which is what we need. We need resilience. Mhmm. And we need certainty, and we need to have confidence.

Renewable and reliable, hydropower offers a high capacity, long duration storage solution.

In this episode, Kate Gilmartin, chief executive of the British Hydropower Association, joins Ed to discuss the different types of hydropower and the role of this technology in long duration energy storage. If you're enjoying the podcast, please hit subscribe so you never miss an episode and give us a rating wherever you listen.

Let's jump in.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of transmission. Today, I am joined by Kate. Kate, welcome to the Moda podcast.

Thank you very much, Ed. Good to be here.

And let's kick off as always by just getting a bit of background in terms of who you are and kind of what's your field of expertise.

Great. Well, thank you very much, Ed. I'm Kate Gill Martin. I'm chief exec at the British Hydro Power Association. And my background, I did an undergrad degree in fuel energy and then a master's in renewable energy. And I've been working in the renewable energy space for a number of years now, across many technologies and also across community energy. I'm a founder member of Community Energy England as well.

Okay. Amazing. And let's just talk a little bit about BHA, so the British Hydropower Association.

What exactly do do they do?

Well, we represent hydropower industry across the UK. We're a membership association, and we are there to promote and enable hydropower and really to try and make it relevant within the government's commitment to decarbonizing the grid by twenty thirty.

Okay. Superb. Hydropower, that encompasses a few things. Right? So what falls within hydropower?

Well, we obviously have hydropower, which is run a river. We also have hydropower that's conventional or reservoir hydro.

We also represent pump storage hydro, which is, two reservoirs, upper and lower, and you, push water down and generate, and then you pump up water to the upper reservoir.

And we also have tidal range, which is either a lagoon or a barrage and is essentially low head hydropower.

Okay. And those let's just talk through kind of how how those work. So I think the one that people might think about first is pumped hydropower, as you say, effectively two sources of of water. Like, how how does that work? What does it typically do?

Well, another word for it is water battery. So, essentially, we we've got four existing pump storage hydro plants in the UK, all now built over fifty years ago, and they were there to really balance out coal and nuclear. So the idea is that you have a base load from coal or power. And, obviously, during the day, we have higher demand. And then during the night, we'd use that cheaper electricity to pump water up into the upper reservoir. And then during those peak t time demands, you can then generate by releasing the water from the upper reservoir down into the lower reservoir.

So it's essentially a a water battery.

Okay. And then as time has gone on, so, obviously, we then start to add more renewables to the system. It's not become such a straightforward kind of coal and gas running to meet demand. We're now starting to add in kind of intermittent generation. The role of that sort of pumped hydro has changed a little bit as as we've kind of got into a more, net zero style system. And so maybe that kind of conventional kind of, charging overnight and then discharging into peak generation has changed a bit?

Yes. Definitely. And if you speak to the operators of pumped storage hydro, they'll tell you that, you know, comparative to forty years ago, they cycle a lot more often now because they are there to pick up those peak demands and also to to pump when we've got surplus generation. So their operational pattern has changed considerably. Now we have more variable renewables on the system.

I suppose I don't really think about pumped hydro cycling just because the the depth, the the duration of some of those sites is so much longer than, say, a standard kind of battery site, which is maybe what we might talk about more on this particular, podcast. So what what is the kind of typical duration of those existing four sites?

In terms of total capacity, they've got twenty six gigawatt hours, of storage.

As you know, we have got the cap and floor coming along, and we've got a pipeline of at least eleven projects that are wanting to come forward through that cap and floor mechanism.

So considering currently, we've got, two point eight gigawatts with twenty six gigawatt hours storage. But actually in the pipeline, there's nearly ten gigawatts with about two hundred gigawatt hours of storage. So we're really kind of increasing that storage capacity.

K. So I'm kind of, like, trying to have do some quick math. So just under ten hours for the current fleet, but twenty hours is kind of what the future fleet looks like.

Each site is different. Each site has a different amount of capacity in storage.

So some are up to thirty six, hours of generation, and others are are smaller at six hours of storage.

Mhmm. But it feels like why can't it be longer? Like, it's just a lake, right, at the top of a hill. Why couldn't it be sort of double that? Is what what stops it from being fifty hours or a hundred hours?

Well, it it depends how you wanna run your plant. But if you're going at full capacity and it's a one point five gigawatt scheme, for example, but you could run that at a third capacity, and then you'd have three times as much storage. But, really, it's about the capacity of the reservoir and how you want to operate your plant.

Okay. So that's pumped hydro. Then on to just sort of regular hydro, so you refer to it as run of river hydro. How how does that work? Is it is that dispatchable in the same way that pumped hydro is?

Well, we have three really three different types of hydropower. So low head hydropower, which is is run of river and is unlikely to have storage. We have high head hydropower, which in some cases will also have storage, so reservoir as well, and then conventional hydropower, which is essentially reservoir hydropower.

So each does something a little bit different. But I think what we really overlook is that within conventional hydropower, so that reservoir hydropower, we've got about nine hundred gigawatt hours of storage, which is a huge amount when you think of the current pump storage hydro capacity, twenty six gigawatt hours. And, really, that storage had just been operating decade after decade during the morning peak and the tea time peak. And, actually, what we're saying to government is that hydropower could be used quite differently, if it was to become smart, flexible through digitization, for example. And, actually, we could be using that to complement the variable renewables on the grid, much better in the future. So we're really kind of pushing government to think hard about how we look at existing hydropower fleets and how we want it to work for us harder in in the future.

Okay.

And then just to so we we've talked about the pumped hydro fleet, the the four particular assets.

The other hydropower you're talking about, what what do those assets look like?

So we've got a total fleet capacity of two gigawatt. We think there's another gigawatt out there. Birmingham University did a piece of work for us a couple of years ago to say that, actually, there's another gigawatt.

And and people always get a bit fixated with total installed capacity. And I think it's worth reminding, everyone that actually total installed capacity doesn't tell us when it's generating, and it doesn't give us capacity factor. So I always kinda push back on government and say, well, it's two gigawatt, but comparative to solar, that's actually kinda more like eight gigawatt in terms of actual generation. But it's generation that happens across winter, at peak tea time demand when we really need it.

So for me, it's it's all about the gigawatt hours and the generation profile rather than the installed capacity. Mhmm. But that two gigawatt of hydropower, that fleet, much of it was built, you know, over fifty, sixty years ago, and it's been working hard, you know, that kind of yeah. I call it the the workhorse of renewables because it's been powering decade after decade for it's it's, you know, it's basically seen the rise and fall of coal, nuclear, and now gas, and it's still generating there in the background.

So these have these assets have real longevity Mhmm. And a real value for just not just our generation and previous generations, but future generations as well.

So someone wanted to see a hydropower site, where would they go? What does it look like?

Well, eighty percent of hydropower is in Scotland.

And, unfortunately, for us as an industry, hydropower isn't particularly visible. So, you know, you might be on a nice walk and you'd go past something that a a kiosk that you might think is a substation, and, actually, it will be a powerhouse. So unless it's a low head hydropower, like an archimedes screw, it's usually hidden away, which is great because it's not visible, and that means that we can have hydropower in national parks and and in world heritage sites.

But actually, in terms of the the the general public and our policymakers and our politicians, they don't see it. It's not very visible.

But you might go to Scotland and see a really big reservoir. And, again, you probably wouldn't you might notice a penstock, and maybe you might notice the powerhouse at the at the bottom of that penstock, but you might just walk past that and not know that there's hydropower generating away in the background there.

Okay. What's a penstock?

Sorry. That's a pipeline.

Okay.

And that's the water from the the top to top top of the, intake to the powerhouse.

Okay. And then we so we've done pumped hydro. We've done hydro power. And then last one is kind of the low head hydro power, which is the as you said, like, the Archimedes screw in a river type situation.

Okay. And then one one thing you just talked about earlier was was around the capacity. So we talked about a few of the capacities of these assets, and then you mentioned the capacity factor. What is that capacity like, what is a capacity factor for for hydro?

Why is it important?

Well, it depends what type of scheme it is, but hydropower can have quite a high capacity factor, which means that it's generating for many of the hours over the year. So for example, Kinloch Leven, which is a a really big, reservoir hydro scheme up in Scotland that was built in nineteen nineteen, It has a ninety five percent capacity factor, so it's generating for ninety five percent of the of the year.

K.

So that's really useful to have. It's kinda like baseload, really.

Yeah. And that's obviously critical. Right? When you have these periods where low solar, low wind, we need things to generate.

Things that have that kind of high capacity factor are really critical in those in those winter periods.

Yes. Absolutely. And I think the other point is that, often hydropower is in rural areas, and it might be embedded generation, so it's connected at the distribution network. And what I keep saying to government is if you want to electrify heat and get people off oil in rural areas where actually that the the end of the grid, and the weak rural grid at that, you know, we need to have generation, new generation. Those electrons need to be generated to match the electrification heat and that kind of flexible load that's gonna be going on the grid as well. So really thinking about hydro powers to in terms of local energy solutions as well.

Mhmm. Okay. Super interesting. The just it just hit me for a moment. Nineteen nineteen nineteen, you mentioned.

How how is that site still running? Is it kind of in its original format, or is it just a totally new site, that was kind of nameplate nineteen nineteen but is now totally different?

So we have a lot of hydropower that has been operating for, you know, a hundred years. And if hydro is well maintained, there's no reason why it can't continue to generate. That particular site did get refurbished, I think, in two thousand and eight. So it has got some new JEUX turbines in there, but there are many sites around the world that are generating after a hundred years of operation. But you have to, you know, you have to maintain those sites. But I think it's a the history of hydropower is really interesting.

A lot of our hydropower fleet was actually developed, under the North of Scotland hydroelectricity board, in the nineteen fifties, and that was done under a social mandate to actually take the grid to the north of Scotland because it was deemed to be important for people to actually have electricity and improve their lives. And I think we've forgotten about that in in some ways in today's world that actually electricity should be there for a social good. And, you know, we should try and get it to be affordable to enable people to have healthy, warm homes as well. So I like the fact that a lot of that hydropower was developed under that social mandate, and it's still there now generating for us. And, actually, that fleet of hydropower in the energy crisis of twenty twenty two, it actually saved us consumers one point one billion on our bills. That's another piece of research that we've undertaken just to show that these assets have value well after the treasury discount rate.

You will certainly have fans of storage listening to this, so they'll they'll always appreciate a stat as well. So, that's really good. And then maybe I just wanted to get into so we've just talked about the sort of hydropower, how hydropower generates, low head and also then the pumped hydro. In terms of other things that say pumped hydro can provide, people often talk about spin gen. What's spin gen?

Well, essentially, I mean, I'd say as well with pumped storage hydro, you know, we it's proven. It's reliable. As I just said, it has longevity. You know, these schemes go on and on. And and the point you just made is it's inertia. You know, these are solid lumps of metal that spin. And, actually, that's really useful on the grid to have that inertia.

So, yeah, there's there's lots of, facets of pumped storage hydro that actually help grid stability and grid operability.

And that's really important in terms of our UK grid resilience as well.

Okay. So this this is kind of the concept that if we need inertia on the system, but we don't necessarily need generation, We could call on pumped hydro to spin the turbines, spin the the mass of those turbines, and that will provide inertia to the system giving system stability.

Yes. Yeah. And I think the other point as well is the size of pumped storage hydro. You know, some of the schemes in the pipeline are one point eight gigawatt.

So this is a huge, you know, huge amount of power, and inertia that can be turned on very, very quickly as well. So I think that's really important to remember the scale of these schemes as well as their longevity and the fact they're proven and reliable.

So lots of positives on the pumped hydro side, but maybe coming on some of the challenges. Right? So I think you mentioned the last project was built in nineteen eighties, which was De Norweg.

But since then, we haven't had a huge amount of well, since then, we haven't had another pumped hydro system coming online. What what are the challenges that face pumped hydro, and why have we not had systems come online?

Well, I think we have to remember that, when the last pumped storage hydro, plants were built, they were done so under state ownership.

So they were state funded. They were state organized, as was a lot of our energy system as well. So these are, you know, high capital cost, and also there is, you know, they're they're they're big and they're infrastructure projects. And we probably could have done with them twenty years ago as we started to look more at intermittent renewables coming online.

But we are where we are. And actually, you know, government recognized now that we need more flexibility in the system as we get more and more renewables on the system as well. So in terms of the barriers, the main barrier has been the price stabilization mechanism that's actually allows investors to have a secure rate of return, which is obviously part of the cap and floor mechanism that's coming through at the moment.

And that enables investors to actually put their money in and actually we can deploy those assets.

Okay. And maybe let's let's talk about, maybe let's just wrap up one last thing on the investment side. So if I'm if I'm building a a pumped hydro site, and apologies to the hydropower and running river hydro here, but how long does that take?

Well, I mean, SSE started Correglass, actually, I think it was fifteen years ago, looking at it, that is. But in terms of how long they actually take, you know, there are developers now working on schemes that they think they can build within five years. Okay. So it depends on the planning process. It depends on having the price stabilization mechanism there, which means you can mobilize investment. And, obviously, not just investment in terms of CapEx, but also in terms of DevEx as well, so that development finance. You have to have a route to market for people to actually put the funding in to get projects through DCO.

So, yeah. So we've got those projects coming through now, which is is really exciting, but we we had to get the cap and floor in place or agreed by government for that mobilization to really happen.

We'll definitely come to cap and floor in a second. Just DCO. What does that mean?

Sorry. The development consent order.

And why is that important for pumped hydro?

It's planning it's anything for planning permission over a hundred megawatts needs to go through the DCO process.

Okay. Superb. Cap and floor, let's do it. Right. So what is the cap and floor?

So, it's probably best to think about the interconnectors. So we've got interconnectors, and they have been brought forward by a price stabilization mechanism, which is called the cap and floor. And that essentially means that if the rates of return drop below a certain threshold, then the consumer will pay the developer. But if the profits go a certain cap, then the developer will pay us as the consumer. And this has worked really well for interconnectors, and we're looking to see whether many of those similarity well, there'll be many similarities between the interconnect cap and floor and pump storage hydro cap and floor. Although the cap and floor for pump storage hydro will be more complex because they are much, riskier projects, and they are more complex in their development.

Okay. And so just kinda a couple of questions around cap and floor. How long does that last for?

We're expecting it to be a twenty five year contract just like the cap and the cap and floor for interconnectors.

Okay.

And how do you kind of how how are you eligible for it?

Well, the there are certain things that governments have yet to decide on, including the eligibility criteria.

However, at the moment, it looks like there'll be two streams. So stream one will be for projects over a hundred megawatts with capacity for six hours. And then stream two oh, sorry. And TRL, so technology readiness level of nine, which means that they are proved and reliable.

So that's where we think pumped storage is gonna be sitting. There's also stream two, which is up to fifty megawatts and, again, six hours of, duration in terms of storage. And that can be projects that are less they're not proven and reliable as yet. They've got a lower technology readiness level.

Mhmm. And and in that lower in, the stream two with the lower TRLs, what are there hydropower techs in there?

Well, yeah, we have got one of our members, Reenergize, and they have a high, high density fluid closed loop pump storage hydro project. So they've got a pilot project going on in Plymouth at the moment, which is, I think that's five megawatts at the moment, and that's through the load pilot innovation project. So, you know, they're looking at whether they can be eligible for that stream two.

Okay.

And other projects like Liquid Air. There's one in Carrington, again, which has come through the load, pilot innovation fund. So, again, they might be in that stream too.

Okay. And then but back to back to stream one, which I think is broadly the the the the biggest stuff. I think there's kind of this is a, this is a a podcast talks about all things energy transition, but also kinda covers batteries. I'm really interested to get your take on from a consumer perspective. Like, what's the right mix of pumped hydro versus battery?

I think that's a really interesting question.

I mean, at the moment, there aren't many battery facilities that are doing six hours, although There are none.

There are, sorry. Yeah. There are none in in the UK, but whether there but there are some in globally.

So there is a consideration of whether this will open the door for batteries to come in and say, well, actually, we could do six hours now if we stack them, etcetera, etcetera.

I think the key for me, I mean, as I said, my background is across all technologies, renewable energy, but also just how do we decarbonize as fast as we can that's going to give us resilience across the system, but it's also gonna give value to consumers.

And I just go back to the point that pump storage hydro, it's proven, it's reliable, and it has longevity. It's gonna be there for a really, really really long time, and that gives value to consumers over a really long period of time. I think I think the other point as well is that there's gonna be different revenue stacks across long duration energy storage.

And but pumped storage hydro will have a different revenue stack to battery storage. And we don't know exactly how the system's gonna operate in five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty five years.

Well, and what we can say is we are more likely to understand the revenue stack and the operation of pumped storage hydro than we are in battery storage.

So I think in terms of NISO, I would be very comfortable with having a good mix, but I really wanna see pumped storage hydro in the mix because, again, it's it's you know, they're used to working with pumped storage hydrant. It's that phone call to say, fire it up.

Yeah. Okay.

But just to come kind of just to talk a little bit about that sort of charging and discharging of storage. Right? So batteries and pumped hydro can both do that. I suppose the thing you're calling out is that one is kind of an electrochemical system with an inverter, whereas that's the the battery storage, and the other one is the pumped hydro, which is effectively, what we've just been describing. So, water running down a hill turn turning a physical turbine, which provides inertia. And so when when you talk about the revenue stack being slightly different, is is is that what you mean, that there's kind of there's kind of other elements of pumped hydro that you don't get with a storage system?

Yeah. I mean, I suppose my point is that batteries can do, fast frequency response, etcetera. And although, pumped storage hydro can, you know, generate within a minute or two, it's not it's not gonna wanna cycle the way a battery does.

So it's gonna be operationally very different to batteries. And it needs to be operationally different because it's a turbine. And the owners of that plant will want to use it in a certain way.

So I think that's the difference. We have to look at how they're gonna operate and how they're gonna operate differently and how they're gonna get their revenue streams. And I think this we need a lot of storage. So I think there's room for for everything, but we definitely need to see pumped storage hydro coming online.

These are big assets. They're big infrastructure assets. They need that support in terms of the cup and floor mechanism. But once they're on the system, they're good for many, many years, which is what we need.

We need resilience. Mhmm. And we need certainty, and we need to have confidence.

Okay. I I can definitely see the argument of the, that there's, like, some market externality going on where, from a security of supply perspective, we're not building enough twenty, thirty, forty hour systems, and we should be doing something to make sure we have that kind of that that type of resilience on the system. Do you at at the at the closer the shorter duration ends. So the long duration storage piece starts at six hours in in the current kind of in the current form. I'm not sure whether that will change.

But do you see, batteries, as you kinda mentioned, batteries globally have kind of gone beyond that six hour range. So do you see a world in which batteries are coming into that sort of six hour plus range and kinda working alongside pumped hydro, or do you think that that is kind of not something that we should be we should almost be there should be, like, an exclusive exclusivity to kind of the cap and floor.

Yeah. I mean, excuse me. I think we're we're we're like to I mean, there's only a couple of our projects that are pumped storage hydro that have a maximum, storage capacity of six hours. Okay. So many of them are are way more than that.

But strategically, some of those projects, those six hours, are in a position where we think, actually, we need them on the grid.

And I think this is what will come out in the eligibility criteria for, Ofgem, working with NESO and DESNERS to look at, well, where do we need the storage and where is it gonna have maximum impact in terms of reduced curtailment, we've got probability.

So I think there is a spatial factor to considering, not just the kind of this is six hours and therefore, this is what we need it to do.

But in terms of that longer medium duration energy storage that pumped storage hydro can do, I don't think batteries should be playing in that sphere really because I don't think that's probably a good business model for them really.

I mean, maybe they'll disagree, but I think that they're an asset that will work very differently from pumped storage hydro. Yeah.

And there's yeah. I think I think they've got there's a there's gonna be there's a massive boom. Obviously, costs have come down, but how we operate those batteries over the long term, nobody can really guarantee that they're gonna want to do the same as pumped storage hydro in the future.

Mhmm.

So if they try and corner the market at the moment, it might be that in five, ten years' time, they're they're behaving a very different way. Yeah. Whereas pumped storage hydro, we know how it's gonna operate Yeah. Over the long term.

I think there's I think there's a couple of really good points. So around the around the system need, absolutely, that kind of, like, what what kind of storage do we need where and what kind of duration do we need? That's that's superb. I think I think we really the the the kind of overall design of the system almost needs that that kind of focus doubling down on.

I'm not sure necessarily that I would agree on the medium duration, in that I think that there's a, from a cost to consumer perspective, I I'm I'm a fan of kind of an open market. So as you say, maybe storage might change its mind or might not want to do that business case. I've kind of it's not, I suppose, up to, the person designing the system. They should just say, right.

What we need is six to eight hours and go for it. And if and if, say, the pumped hydro is a nice solution for that, then great. Let's build that. If storage is a nice solution for that, great.

Go ahead and build that. If, actually, we shouldn't be building any storage and we should be building another interconnector, then, maybe that's the right solution. But, I think maybe system need and then open markets feels to me to be a good a good mix.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I suppose if you look at a map where the pump storage is likely to be, you know, we've got a big cluster around the Great Glen, for example. So if you look at the gigawatt hours of storage there, but then you think about the offshore wind and then you think about the bootstrap that's gonna come down to the southeast, for example, and also you think about how the interconnectors work across Europe and how we're gonna be the buzz bar of Europe. So I think a lot of storage that's gonna be multiple gigawatt hours in terms of, you know, two hundred gigawatt hours, one hundred and fifty gigawatt hours, I think that's incredibly useful. And that's something that is very unlikely that batteries are gonna be located there doing that job.

But at the end of the day, we we need a lot of everything. Mhmm. So it's sometimes hard to have this either or conversation because in my mind, it's and.

Yeah. And and that's where the system your point around the system need is a really good one, which is to say, hey. Look. We actually need four hundred gigawatt hours of storage that looks something like eight or sixteen hours, whatever it is. Once you know what that number is, you can kind of then go and procure it. And as you say, similar for short duration, but if you had two six hour batteries, but the number you actually need is ten, you can run them as ten hour systems. You just run them at slightly lower power.

So Yeah.

There's a kind of a there's a there's a there's a way of kind of satisfying that need if you need to.

When do what's what's next on, the cabin floor? When when do we hear the next step forward?

So at the moment, we've got Ofgem have created a new team, and they're gonna be working with Desnez on the cap and floor. And we we've actually got a meeting with them tomorrow, so we know they're in place now. And Desnaz and Ofgem are gonna be working on the eligibility criteria and the technical decision document. So, basically, the nitty gritty of what the cap and floor is gonna look like.

And, yeah, hopefully, as an industry, we'll be continuing to talk to them about what we need it to look like to make sure that we have that investor certainty and that these projects in the pipeline can mobilize within the time frame that we need them to mobilize in. We're hoping that the application window will be open at the end of twenty twenty five for the cap and floor, and that's certainly what our members are working towards at the moment. Mhmm. So we're saying to government that pace is everything because, actually, this is a global supply chain.

It's a global skill set, and it requires global capital. And we are in a bit of a global race in terms of pumped storage hydro around the world. There's a lot of eyes on how the UK's cabin floor is gonna work at the moment. And, you know, we have to work really hard as UK PLC to make sure that that supply chain is is utilized in the projects in the UK rather than going to Canada or Australia.

So, you know, I'm reminding government that it's it's not a fait accompli. You know, we've gotta keep pushing this really hard to make sure that we can get everything we need in the UK to deliver that pipeline of projects.

Yeah. And when, we saw something recently on Clean Power twenty thirty talking about some of the potential constraint costs we could see on the system, exactly to your point, if you have lots of generation in the north, but you can't necessarily get it down into the south. Some of those constraint costs are really large, like six to eight billion potentially per year in twenty thirty, which from a cost to household perspective is like two hundred two hundred to three hundred pounds per household. So if you can do anything with, say, pumped hydro that kind of offers you a little bit of flexibility to as sort of to some degree a backup to what is going on within the transmission built out, then, hey. Surely, that's a a good a good place.

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the underpinning reason for the cabin floor was off the back of the LCP Delta report that said that in all scenarios, the cabin floor bringing forward long duration energy storage was a no regrets decision. It was gonna save consumers money on their bill. What we've got to remember though is that actually it is a global supply chain, and we don't wanna overheat that supply chain and see cost escalation and cost inflation.

So we have to think really hard about across, not just about pumped storage hydro, but across the whole net zero delivery, you know, in terms of transmission network, in terms of offshore wind, in terms of the skills that we need, you know, shortage of welders, you know, there's just a massive skills gap and that all needs to be worked across across the whole technology piece as well in in in this kind of push to to get to to decarbonize by twenty thirty. Mhmm. Mhmm.

Agreed. And so you were mentioning some projects might be coming online sort of late twenty twenties, but the cap and floor is potentially not yet agreed. So are those projects, they're kind of they're sort of taking the investment decision, but they're kind of bearing a lot of the risk in terms of bringing these projects through. Is is that is that kind of where they are? And then and do we expect to see them coming online in sort of twenty six, twenty seven? Is that when we see the first ones?

We we won't see any commissioned until at least two thousand and thirty. Okay. I mean, Correglass, which is the SSC project, they had committed, you know, a hundred million to doing the access tunnel, and really, that was to find out what the it was all about geological investigation to see what the ground's like. So they've done, you know, this one point two kilometer tunnel now that's nine hundred meters below the the the surface, but they still haven't reached their final investment decision.

You know, that is still gonna be deliberated through the cap and floor mechanism. They have to see what the investment case looks like with the cap and floor, with the detail of the cap and floor. So, yeah, all these projects are being developed at risk at the moment, in the hope that, yeah, the capital floor is gonna be in place and that they're gonna have an investable proposition, and they can then go on and and actually commission their projects. But, yeah, no projects, I don't think, will be delivered before two thousand and thirty.

Mhmm. But twenty thirty is obviously the aspiration.

That's just such a useful kind of size of, DevX costs, like the hundred million, but it's actually pre FID. And I think I've seen a picture of that of that, access tunnel. It's enormous. Like, we're not talking about a small project here. This is this is like serious infrastructure.

Yeah. Exactly. And and and we we took some of the LDAS team from Desmos, up to see it because it's really impressive, and you realize the scale and the enormity of these projects. And even if you go to see an existing pumped storage hydrant, their permanence is just impressive because they're huge and they're there and they're permanent. And that should give us a bit of reassurance, I think, as well in terms of our grid resilience.

And also, like, extremely jealous because they are, like, the most beautiful, like, assets that you go and see. Like, if you go to, like, to Norwig or look out on these reservoirs, they are like a a fantastic holiday into some of the most beautiful parts of the country. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and and, you know, they're often called kind of underground cathedrals because that's the size of these cabins as well.

And they are real feats of engineering and they are mega projects. You know, these are billion pound projects and they're massively impressive. And I think the key is that we haven't done it for a long time. This will be the largest scale, rollout of large scale hydropower, in over fifty years.

And from a skill set point of view, it's really important that we we bringing through the engineers.

And we we've got a generation of engineers that are really kind of just at retirement or post retirement, and we've got to train up our younger engineers on the back of their coattails, really, as these projects move forward. So it's a great skill set within the industry and, yes, they're impressive projects.

Okay. I have two final questions for you. The first one is, is there anything you'd like to plug?

Well, we've already talked about tidal range, so I think I should definitely plug tidal range.

So we have twenty gigawatt potential as an island nation with the second highest tidal range in the world.

And historically, tidal range has been dismissed because of a high levelized cost of energy.

And what Projects like Swansea Lagoon?

Yeah. There was there was Swansea Bay tidal lagoon, but there's other projects that are in development at the moment. So Mersey Tidal Barrage, for example, or West Somerset Lagoon. And these are six hundred megawatts and one point five gigawatt projects making use of that high title range stating the high levelized cost of energy in a very different world. And I think levelized cost of energy as a metric is too blunt an instrument to make these decisions on. It doesn't include kinda external costs, etcetera.

It certainly doesn't consider variability of renewables or the grid infrastructure that's required to reinforce from, you know, offshore wind. So we are really stating the case to government and saying, actually, these aren't just energy generation projects. They're infrastructure projects that come with an entire supply chain requirement that needs an industrial strategy and the jobs and the skills that sit behind that. But also, it's all about UK grid resilience. And we are an island nation. And geopolitically wise, we should really be thinking how best we can reduce our fossil fuel consumption from a climate perspective, but also from a geopolitical perspective.

And the key is that if we have timetabled energy generation from twenty gigawatts of tidal range across the country, which kind of acts like a base load, then that is something that we really need to be focused on bringing forward. And in terms of grid operability as well, you know, this is generation next to load. So if you think these projects are next to Liverpool, Cardiff, Swansea, it's not just next to load. It's next to increasing load. And that circumvents a lot of the issues we've got with the transmission upgrades that we're we're all waiting to see happen. So title range should be there in the mix.

We have to say to government, levelized cost of energy is a metric. It's redundant. We need to think from a we need to think harder about the metrics that we're using in terms of grid security, grid resilience, and also just our energy sovereignty as well.

Okay. And I I I think sort of pound for pound on on projects mentioned, title projects nearly always get a mention on, let's say we're into kind of the YouTube comment section. We will hundred percent have many fans of of of kind of title coming out to say, finally, we've kind of covered it. Yes.

So yeah. Yeah. A very good plug. And then what is your contrarian view? So what is what is one thing that you believe that the majority of the market doesn't?

Well, I always talk a lot about local energy solutions.

I think there's been so much focus on big, you know, big solar, big wind, everything's offshore. Sorry, everything's transmission connected.

What I always say is we can't decarbonize, unless we're looking at the distribution network, which is where we're gonna have to electrify heat and transport and where we're gonna have to persuade people to to electrify heat and transport.

So I think it's hugely overlooked. I talk about hydropower, which in in most cases is connected at the distribution network. And I talk about the fact that we need new generation to meet the new smart, flexible load of electrification, heat, and transport in a whole system community approach. And until we really understand what that looks like and how important it is, it's all just top down, and we're not gonna bring people along with us. I also think that to most people, decarbonizing the grid by two thousand and thirty is irrelevant.

What people want is affordable energy and healthy, warm homes. And that again goes back to local energy solutions. So from my perspective, we have to do much more work at the local community level to actually show people a vision of what decarbonization looks like in terms of real and tangible benefits for consumers and for householders within communities for them to really get buy in. And we don't get buy in, we're not gonna be able to do this.

Oh, I I one hundred percent agree. If we don't put pounds back into people's pockets and they don't feel the benefit of the transition, we are gonna be in a real, sticky situation come twenty thirty. So, yeah, wholeheartedly agree. Maybe that's not the point of a contrarian question, but I agree with you.

Okay. Perfect. Brilliant. Well, Kate, thank you very much for coming on Transmission. You've been a fantastic guest, and, we'll have you back anytime.

Thank you, Ed. It's been really enjoyable. Thank you very much.

Thank you for listening to Transmission, a MODO Energy podcast. Transmission delivers conversations from industry leaders and experts exploring energy markets and the operations and technologies related to grid scale battery energy storage. Check out our other episodes by searching transmission wherever you get your podcasts.

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