Decarbonizing industrial heat with James MacNaghten (CEO @ Caldera)

You use materials that are everywhere. There's no shortage of and if I've got this right, there's no shortage of the stuff you guys are pulling and pulling into one place. We want the lowest worse grades of aluminum because the only thing we care about is the conductivity. We don't care about the properties.

We don't care if it's got weird alloys in it. So from a recycling point, if you were great, because you would do things very differently if you were if you were designing the factory from scratch, but a lot of factories have grown very organically. They know that they could change their process and potentially run it at a lower temperature, but they simply can't stop production. And you said they actually go, it's much better if we can just run business as usual and carry on using Steam because I can't afford to take that whole line out and replace it with a different machine that runs at a lower temperature.

As I said, you can go direct electric, or you can go direct which electric boiler, but you're gonna have to pay grid prices potentially and you're gonna have to upgrade your grid connections, which is ex as I said, expensive. Hello, everybody. Welcome back for another episode of transmission. Today, Q is chatting to James McNorton, co founder, and CEO at Calderira.

Over the course of the conversation, they discuss the process needed in decarbonizing industrial heat and the part that Cowdera plays in that. If you're enjoying the podcast, please hit like and subscribe. It really means the world to us. And with that, let's jump in.

Hello, James. Thanks for coming on the podcast. I'm gonna start by asking you. So what is industrial heat?

Okay. So industrial heat is all of the energy that's used to make, steel, cement, processing plastics, and it had everything down to producing food, brewing beer, and it it covers a very wide range of temperatures, and it also covers an enormous amount of energy. Some of it is a temperatures that are at fifteen hundred degrees Celsius that you can't even look at without wearing special equipment all the way down to sort of how do you make your beer and brewing it in a brewery? So it's heat for processes, but there's a whole wide range of the amount of heat you need.

I imagine if you're in a kind of steel making, you need a lot of heat and yeah. How hot do you need to get for beer making, by the way? For beer making, it's broadly a hundred Celsius. So it's that but you tend to want to yes.

So beer making's up at around hundred because you want to have your hot liquor tank, you heat it up and you've got your beer. The way you the and and the the market segmented, there's a couple of temperature bands where there's really quite a lot of heat used. And between those, there are about four temperature bands that are useful, I'll also mention. So there's up to a hundred degrees, which can be things like pasteurization, of milk, cheese making, a lot of so that's a lot of food processing can all be sub a hundred degrees Celsius.

Between a hundred and two hundred Celsius, Generally, people use heat in the form of steam, and they write the reason people use steam is it's just the most amazing medium for moving heat around in. So what you find is they put these big pipes in that carry steam around and they carry the most massive amount of heat in them.

And it can be everything from hospitals to distillaries, and it generally provides heat at between one hundred and two hundred. There's broadly a big gap then until you get to about It's around about nine hundred where they make cement. And then there's another big gap until you get to about fifteen hundred where you make steel making. And in between those temperature ranges, there's a bit used, but it's not nearly as much as those four bands I've mentioned.

And how did these manufacturers or process companies. How how do they get the heat right now? Is it electric elements? It's all gas.

It's all natural gas. It's you have these great big boilers that you stand next to that tower over you, and they're in big plant rooms, and they have you might have five of them in a row, and two of them are running flat out. And one of them is on standby, and the other two are just there because you've got servicing. And the key rule is you need them for processes and you can't stop.

If you're producing something and you lose your heat supply, potentially everything you're making that day could be ruined. And you might even have the situation where things end up setting in machinery, and you end up having to dismantle it. So from a I'm running a factory perspective. This is your sort of people we can talk to.

They can't afford to risk having it. So they tend to run them quite inefficiently as in They have more on than they need to because they just don't want to risk not being with being without heat if there's a problem with one boiler. So there's a range of heats and a generally mostly, this is burning gas, natural gas for boilers, and then you move that heat around in the process of other factories somewhere.

And how efficient is the is this an efficient way to do it right now? I would say it's reasonably efficient, and it's very cost effective. Boilers, gas boilers are not very expensive, and historically gas has not been very expensive. So everything has changed in the last eighteen months since, Russia invaded Ukraine, and everyone has a very different view about at the cost of fuel.

But up until you're paying a couple of pence per kilowatt hour for your gas, it's it's a very low number, and it it just wasn't I think for a lot of factories, it wasn't that high up on the list. Yes. They had their environmental goals, but it wasn't. Now it's suddenly affecting people's profit margins, and their bottom line energy is still right to the top of the agenda.

And all of this heat that we have to generate for manufacturing and process and industrial heat. Sorry. That's the word. Yep.

How much of of of all of our emissions. What kind of percentage is industrial heat response? Twenty percent. Twenty percent.

So is that of of kind of UK emissions? So it's twenty percent of global emissions. It's slightly lower in the UK because we don't have as much industry, so we don't do as much. Still making cement making as we used to, but it's broadly twenty percent of all emissions.

And the and one of that of that twenty percent, under two hundred degrees is about thirty five percent. Okay. So this is a big chunk of of carbon and emissions to go after. And what so Kaldira, your company?

Do you want me to just if you if you wouldn't mind, explain what you believe at Kaldira, what's the mission? What are you guys trying to do? So our log on mission is to decarbonize industrial heat, but we're very focused on doing it using thermal storage. So we've I hopefully get a chance to talk a little bit about how we are our whole technology behind it, but we take renewable energy, we take off peak, low carbon energy, and we store it as heat.

To use on demand as heat. Now you could call it a thermal storage. You could call it heat batteries. In other word, people sometimes use it doesn't produce the only reason to trouble something confusing is we don't produce electricity.

But the reason we we take electricity and convert it to heat is it's much, much cheaper to store it as heat than it is to store it in electrical battery to get electricity back out. So if you have an application where the temperature range means you're probably likely to if you did wanted to use an electric battery to do it with direct heating, we're a much, much lower capital cost route for tackling that. So it's the way you guys fit into the world of industrial heat that an existing manufacturer say they're a a beer maker or brewery, they currently have a gas boiler. And they use that to to for the process heat. And instead of using using a gas boiler, you guys come in and installed an electrical system with a heat with your heat storage unit, and then they can use that heat when they need it, or using, all, all via electrification rather than a gas system.

Yes. But you have to go further than that because it doesn't work buying grid electricity at the moment. There are no grid electricity tariffs that are less than the price of gas. For industrial users.

So what we actually do this is The third of October twenty twenty three. And then so right now, is it is it cheaper to burn gas than to electrify? If you're buying electricity from the grid, yes, it is. If you do what we're aiming to do, which is you build a very large behind the meter solar farm, you connect it all up behind the meter.

We have a really nice way of making it appear to the grid to effectively be a smaller solar farm than we've actually connected. So We don't look to export, and we don't have grid connection issues.

We have our cheap supply of energy from the solar, but we don't use it just for heat. We use it for heat and electricity, and that's how you get to install something with an economic payback and cut carbon. Okay. Makes sense.

And Kaldira has been going for a few years, so he said since twenty seventeen. Just wanted to talk a little bit about your journey because You guys, you you did some work with domestic to begin with, didn't you? And then now you're focused on industrial heat. That seems to be the the big market opportunity you're going after, and you can add value to.

How did you go through the process of of that pivot and, and why did you do that? So we we raised so it's got we raised money in twenty twenty one. We went on to a crowdfunding method called crowd cube to support effectively rolling out domestic sized units. So each one was a hundred kilowatt hours.

Weighs about one point seven tons. So not particularly light, but you can put it outside a house. So we are very much targeting older houses that were off the gas bridge, so using oil, and where they wanted high temperature water, which we deliver very easily. We brought you, we had twelve units go out.

We put ten into homes. We put two heating a church. And then, basically, you ended up with, again, Russia invading Ukraine.

And all of the off peak tariffs disappeared overnight. So rather than being cheaper than oil, which is you could get an octopus, go tariff, but cheaper than oil, pre that, those all disappeared overnight, and we were lee left with a product that cost more than an oil boiler, and it cost much more to run than an oil boiler. And the the the thing we knew was you all we always knew behind the meter solar was the the cheapest solution for electricity. But the problem is that homeowners use the vast majority of their energy in December and January when it's cold, but solar generates almost nothing.

And they and then conversely, when solar generates the most in June and July, the homeowner doesn't need it. Whereas, whereas industrial customers, they tend to use process heat the whole year round, So it was almost like that. We we had to switch to it. So we made a decision.

We didn't want to be selling a product in the domestic market. We had an opportunity to switch. We'd wanted to do it. I think later, I would have said.

But we've I would say needs must. We're very much Well, like, no, we have to have that something where people can pay for this equipment in a short period of time. And hence, we've done this pivot, and we're building bigger heat cells, and we combine them together into banks to basically provide megawatt hours of heat. And we've also been successfully getting quite a lot of government money towards us building our first demonstration system, which is out the back of the factory.

Okay. We've gotta get straight. We're gonna get onto the technology because I saw a video on your website, and it is pretty unusual. And that what I've really liked about it is you use materials that are everywhere.

There's no shortage of and if I've got this right, there's no shortage of the stuff that you guys are pulling and pulling into one place. Can you just explain how the technology works and how you came up with it? So the tech okay. The technology works is we create a block of our thumb storage material which is basically a combination of recycled aluminum and volcanic rock.

And we want the lowest worst grades of aluminum. Because the only thing we care about is the conductivity. We don't care about the properties. We don't care if it's got weird alois in it.

So from a recycling point, if you were great because we use the grades that at the moment tend to go into things like car engine blocks because they also use very low grades. And as we electrify, people are suddenly going, what am I gonna do with all of these engine blocks? I used to just remelt, we will take them. So we basically take a container full of rocks, We heat it up, and we melt our aluminum, we pour it over the rocks, and it then falls in between all the holes in the rocks.

And I describe it. If you were to cut it in half, it would look a bit like a rocky road cookie, or the best analogy.

But basically, the aluminum holds everything together, and it's got a hundred times the conductivity of the rocks. So that we can what we do is we we effectively are able to heat it electrically by putting heating elements in, and we also put a we put a coil, a heat exchange coil within the block when we make it, and we get heat out by putting water into that coil and it flashes to steam. So It's really simple. There's no moving parts. And because the aluminum's so conductive, you can heat it at very high rates.

And it's also very ductile, so it manages when you heat big things rapidly, you get a lot of thermal movement. And again, the aluminum, because it's in that range where it's quite soft because It melts. It's not we don't we we're not far away from its melting temperature, maybe a hundred degrees. It actually just allows everything to move and works brilliantly.

So We end up with these blocks of aluminum and rock, and the rock is there because it's cheap. While we while recycled aluminum is cheap, we want it to be cheaper still. So we just fill it out with rocks. And they just add bulk without affecting the properties.

What sort of rocks are they? Are these pebbles? Or this is this special type of quarried rock or I I will it's a this is the beautiful thing about it. It's a bit like making concrete.

We actually buy our basalt from a garden center supplier.

So it's the same rocks you'd use on your path in your garden. They're just the right size, and it's just very easy for us to get hold of them. As we scale, Yes. I want to be buying them direct from a quarry, but broadly, you want them to be hard and stay together, so you don't want sedimentary rocks.

But pretty much any of the granite's are fine, basalt's are fine. Any of the volcanic rocks are just they're just quite strong. And heat's all about temperature. Right?

And we've talked about a range of temperatures from a hundred degrees and below all the way up to fifteen hundreds and and above to make steel. What about your technology? How hot do these cells get, and how do you heat them and what happens to them when they get hot? We heat them up to five hundred degrees Celsius, which we call full.

And if we're delivering steam at ten bar, we'll we race it, run them between five hundred Celsius and three hundred. So they have a two hundred degree temperature range difference. If we're delivering heat at lower temperatures, we can actually run them a bit cooler, but that's why we normally want at least a hundred degrees difference between the temperature of our block and the heat we're delivering. And to keep the heat in, we encase the entire thing in a vacuum insulation.

Which is really important if you're making something that's hot and small. These did you call themselves?

Yes. So we call them the effects that you make heat cells and you stack lots of them together. But I imagine they're very heavy aluminum and rocks. The new version is five five tons each roughly.

So they're one point two meters in diameter and they're one point two meters across and they're two and a half meters high. And how so one and a half diameter and two and a bit me, two and a half meters high. Yeah. How much energy? How much thermal energy can you store in one of these big cells.

Two hundred kilowatt hours. So that's for steam generation at ten bar. So you put ten of them together and you've got two megawatt hours. I think I know how hot things work, but every time I talk to a mechanical engineer about anything to do with steam, I lose my mind with how complicated steam gets.

How do you turn the energy that's in the hot rocks back into steam for process steam?

So we have a we call it a clean steam loop. We inject water into our pipe, flashes it to steam, And we run the pipes are dry. So the steam comes out the other side, and it goes to, at a heat exchanger, and on the other so it runs at higher pressure So there there needs to be a temperature difference. So our steam needs to be higher pressure and slightly hotter than their steam.

And we have a heat exchanger and that generates steam on the customer side. And it condenses the water and we reinject it. And if you want more power out of our our cells, you turn the amount of water you inject up. So the effectively, the water we put in is a bit like, it's like a throttle on your car, more petrol, more power.

With us, it's more water, more power. Awesome. I I wanna talk about how customers are using this right now, but could you just give an overview of where the company's at? So you've been going since twenty seventeen.

You did some crowdfunding.

And, yeah, how many people are involved in the company, how many assets or how many cells you have out there in the world operating some numbers about it. Right. So we've got just over twenty employees now. We've got we've put the twelve trial units that we did for domestic.

They've all gone out they've been in the field. We've got port eight of them back and we left four running. We are currently building a four megawatt hour system. So twenty heat cells at our factory in Ferham, and we're looking to do our first commercial deployments in twenty twenty five.

So where we'll be going on to industrial sites, and we'll be combining them with solar, and you'll be doing, effectively a combined package where we provide heat and electricity.

And if the elect the market stay as they are at the moment, it's got a really good payback, which is amazing when you consider that the UK is not very sunny. What what what does that mean of a really good payback?

We can we've been looking at projects where you spend four and a half million. And you get your money back in five and a half years, and you cut thirty percent off your carbon emissions for the factory. And I don't know of anyone where you can genuinely cut thirty percent carbon emissions off a site with a five and a half year payback. So it's really good.

Unless you tell me of otherwise, but I just don't see it. Normally, it's you end up wanting a big cut in carbon, you end up having to have a long payback. Yes. But it depends how you skin the cat.

Right? Another question I wanted to ask you was, so industrial heat companies that use industrial heat. There's a few different ways I can go away about decarbonizing it. Some of them might have combined here in power units or they might have other technologies or they might be looking at electrical batteries and and various other things.

So where does where's the sweet spot? Sit for you guys. What types of industrial heat are the most efficient and the best payback for customers? And how are you thinking about where Kaldira fits alongside all these other technologies.

Expanding grid infrastructure is a real problem. So direct electrification is going to take a lot of time and money. So it's very hard to overnight to to replace a gas load with an electric load, and it's expensive. And it requires a lot of grid upgrades and cost.

We also when we look at the market, we go under a hundred to BC, we assume we'll be dealt with by heat pumps. That's our view. I actually know we can run alongside heat pumps because I've been to a factory where they've decarbonized everything and used heat pumps, and they still need an boiler to provide maybe thirty, twenty five, thirty percent of the power because they've got batch processes and heat pumps are not great at turning up and down. They tend to want to run steady state.

So I think we have a place alongside heat pumps that's quite complimentary where we provide a lot of flexibility, and they provide the sort of steady state operation. But generally under a hundred degrees, we we normally say you should get a heat pump.

Between a hundred and two hundred, we see as our sweet spot, it's easy for us to deliver technically, And it's hard for heat pumps to deliver technically. You probably will be aware heat pumps can run-in that temperature range, but they almost always need to have a heat supply that is well above ambient to make it worth doing. And I I've ended up describing it. When we go into factories, you would do things very differently if you were if you were designing the factory from scratch.

If you have a blank piece of paper, you can sort all of this out. But a lot of factories have grown very organically, and it's a bit like your house. Probably my heating system, my house I know what's wrong with that. I still don't get around to fixing it.

And I don't always, therefore, do the right thing because it's just not actually very convenient. And we see the same thing with factories, which is they know that they could change process and potentially run it at a lower temperature, but they simply can't stop production.

And you said they actually go into much better if we can just run business as usual and Karen using Steam. Because I can't afford to take that whole line out and replace it with a different machine that runs at a lower temperature. So I see us we see our particular suite adopting a hundred and two hundred. Other companies might want to go higher than that.

As I said, you can go direct electric or you could go direct which electric boiler, but you're gonna have to pay grid prices potentially and you're gonna have to upgrade your grid connections, which is ex as I said, expensive. And then the other side of that, you might have electric batteries, which we think it we should use for storing electricity, not for storing. If electric batteries are the same price as us, that'd be fine then put the electric battery in, but we're expecting to be around a third of the price. Of lithium ion, which I know is your favorite subject.

I'm never listening to you about the podcast. Why, what's that? What's that?

Atari, I can't help it. But If I've got this right, just we're gonna put the video link in the notes. So if you're listening to this, do check out the video. Calderero got a great video that that that shows and doesn't tell.

It just shows you how they build these things. And it really is so simple. And I I mean that as a compliment, not as a as a dis, if you like. That really the it sounds like how dearer's value proposition is to a factory.

You guys are gonna decarbonize heat. We can help you do it at a third of the cost of getting in a lithium ion battery. Oh, and by the way, we're gonna use load of abundant materials and not disrupt too much of how your factory operates. And you get a pretty good payback period.

Pretty sensible. So could you just talk or riff if you like? Talk talk about one of the projects that you're working on at the moment, how that looks, what the customers using Cardera for, and and how how it all fits together. So we have we have an MOU with an NHS trust.

We're looking at a project where we increase the amount of solar they've got by another twelve megawatts.

And we're looking at decarbonizing their boilers. So they have gas boilers. We're gonna switch two of them over to electric. We're gonna put in something like twenty four megawatt hours of thermal storage.

And they have a CHP plant. They will carry on running, but the end result is we think that we can get them to a point where they don't need to use the gas boilers for heating the site. So that is a for us is a great project, and it's what it's about, which is cutting carbon. And you talked earlier about the different temperatures, which are it's fascinating, right? So you guys are going after the hundred to two hundred degrees realm.

There's a bit around the nine hundred degrees, and then there's a fifteen hundred degrees, which is the, melting bits of metal and steel making. You've spent a lot of time thinking about this. I'm just interested. How do we decarbonize those bits as well?

I know it's not your I know it's not the area that Kaldir is focused on, but if we're gonna decarbonize steel or these high temperature applications, what are we gonna do? That is the one area I think, yeah, we'd use hydrogen. And I'm relatively skeptical about the uses for hydrogen, but you're not gonna move heat around at fifteen hundred degrees Celsius. You're just not.

It when you do the calculations for the size of the and what it would look like in the way. It's just not gonna happen. So I think it that would be a use for my mind for hydrogen.

Alongside replacing all the hydrogen that we make at the moment from natural gas. At lower temperatures, like nine nine hundred, I would assume we'd do it electrically, with batteries. And again, the people tend to think of heat as being heat. I can move heat around, but actually that's not really true.

Moving heat around at nine hundred is very different to moving heat around at two hundred. I know people can't see it, but if I took a fifteen centimeter pipe with steam at ten bar, I can move something like five megawatts of heat through that. If I wanted to do the same thing with air at a thousand degrees, I end up with a pipe that's two meters in diameter. Which is a problem.

Are you are you a mechanical engineer, James? Is that how you I am yes. I we can't continue. And what about charging rates?

How fast can you I'm using the word charge like it's a battery, but I think that's quite a useful way to think about it. How fast can you charge and discharge these things? It's a very good analogy to a battery. So In the applications we look at, we think you really want to charge very rapidly.

It does depend on what you're supplying the electricity from, but from solar, We think you have to be able to go from nothing to full charge in under four hours. You might want to discharge over twenty four hours, but you generally get very short sharp windows of opportunity to put energy away. And so we we design our system so you can put a lot of heat in very rapidly without there being any problems. I suspect if you looked at the grid of the future where you were charging from wind and it was windy for three or four days, you would want a different sort of ratio.

But at the moment, we see very clearly you want rapid electrical charging and then much slower discharge of heat. And then, yeah, not I I have a habit of doing this, which is every time someone talks about another battery chemistry or battery type, I can't help but ask the question about efficiency and tie it back to how it compares to lithium ion and other things. And I know that there's a there's more to life than just round trip efficiency. There's CapEx and there's OpEx and there's all the other things.

But how thermally efficient or how efficient is a Kaldira system.

So I it depends on how look. I'm I think efficiency is important, so I'm hundred percent with you on that. Most of our applications, you're gonna charge from solar during the day. You're gonna discharge in the evening overnight early morning.

You'll be over ninety five percent efficient. I. E. From hundred units of electricity, you will get at least ninety five units of heat back out.

With our domestic units, we could leave them at five hundred degrees Celsius and it took them twenty one days to get down to two hundred. And the they are smaller units. The new one should be bigger and should lose less heat. But generally, we expect our efficiency to be around ninety five percent, which I think beats lithium ion.

Well, it depends where you measure it, but and not that it's a competition.

I guess with heat, you've got the the added complexity of is a self discharge with heat. I can't remember the equation now. It's been a long time since I've done anything that isn't isn't cash in, cash out, and is already left. But the hotter so the difference between the the material and the outside temperature, that that differential defines the rate of change of temperature Right?

So I'd imagine that it's a nonlinear discharge rate, self discharge rate. Right? You are absolutely spot on? So of the twenty one days, it takes about three and a half days to go from five hundred to four hundred, it takes about six and a half days to go from four hundred to three hundred and the rest of the time to go down from three hundred to two hundred.

So the good thing about that is the sun comes up every day. So your charging over four hours, and you're using that heat, most likely over the next twenty four. No problem. In fact, is there a time when you would need to store heat in the battery twenty one days.

Maybe if you had some maintenance or something, but that's probably about it, isn't it? No. This is why we say the efficiency is so good, and it It's not one of the things we worry about because we're expecting you to be fully discharged within twenty four hours.

The we don't see business cases that work for storing it for multiple days at a time. At the moment, we we want to all of the business cases that pay back at the moment, you put just enough storage in to get you through the night. You certainly don't put any in to carry you through for more than that. Because the economics don't work.

So we're very focused on decarbonize the easy stuff today and do it quickly because actually we think saving carbon now is more important than saving carbon in ten years. And then as the cost of our technology goes down, still as we think solar and grid electricity go down, yes, to do the harder things, but it's much much more important that we deploy rapidly now and make an impact than wait five years for something that decarbonizes a hundred percent of a site. We I would much rather go and do thirty percent today, and then another twenty five percent in four years. And then maybe a bit more in another five years beyond that than try and tackle what I think is very hard, which is taking people completely off fossil fuels in a very short period of time.

Yeah. There's also a compounding effect where this is a separate conversation. It's a bit like a discounted cash flow model There's a dis discounted emissions model where the sooner you abate, the more over the lifetime of planet Earth, you you have a a a net positive benefit. But anyway, that's a that's an aside.

And now on to the last few questions. So, of course, The first one is do you have anything to plug? This is your chance to talk about some stuff you're working on or a big announcement. Ideally, something the world has never heard before.

And then the second one is what's your contrarian view. But let's do the plug first. Okay. So for the plug, we are back out fundraising again on crowd cube.

I think we've just announced it today, although I know this will come out just shortly afterwards, but it's gonna be running for the next few weeks. So we currently have thirteen hundred investors It's brilliant. I mean, that number of shareholders, it's really quite fun. And we have people that are really supportive.

I get So so I'm if if anyone is interested, we want to grow this, we'll be on thirteen hundred. So that would be my plug. Please go on to cryo cue. Please register.

Please have a look at up page, and I should probably add there are some be aware risk warnings around investing or making these sort of investments, which will also be covered on the page. Yeah. We'll we'll put a link into the podcast notes, and we will if there's anything legal we need to put here, we'll make sure we put it there. Okay.

Now the best one. So what is James, what is the thing that you believe? What's your contrarian view that most of the people don't? Think I can try and view.

The one that seems to get, I get a certain level of grief overs, I think we have to stop. Shutting coal and gas power stations, and we need to stop people closing them because we need them for security of supply, I'm a hundred percent believer we can decarbonize vast amounts of our economy, and I think we're going to do it with wind and solar. But there are periods when it's not windy, it's not sunny. And to be honest, the weather patterns are changing, and we have to have power plant that we can run.

When it's not wind in, it's not sunny. And it, to me, it seems obvious that we need to keep that amount of thermal generation available because there are no long duration storage technology. The idea that we'll do this with hydrogen anytime in the next two decades is fantasy.

And part of my belief around both coal and gas is I actually think gas is a much dirtier fuel than people realize, particularly when it's been cracked and you get well leakage of methane, but also coal is the easiest fuel in the world to store. So it's a great fuel for security of supply. And one of my big passions is once you know that you've got enough backup power to cover the periods when it's not wind and it's not sunny, we can stop worrying about security supply, and then we can build as much wind and as much solar as we possibly can because we've covered any periods when it's not running.

But the problem is this plant is not gonna run very often, so you do not want to be building new power stations that run five or ten percent of the time. So it's got to be cheaper to refurbish recondition, old plant, and keep them available, then it pair capacity payment for this than to let people demolish them because we're now just gonna have to replace these ones, and we've lost something like ten gigawatts of generation in the UK in the last decade And I'm really worried we have not got enough thermal plant to cover those periods when it's not windy and it's not sunny. So you point out about methane leakage and the true like, it levelized emissions cost if you like in the whole supply chain of natural gases.

I think it's absolutely fascinating. I think it's something that I know there's lots of great work happening to to measure it, but I do join you in that almost skepticism in some elements of how clean natural gas is portrayed to be. It's a tricky one. Right?

So I actually share your concern. We haven't we clearly with the latest wind offshore wind round. We are not gonna be able to build wind as fast as we all expected. I say it's as fast as we all expected.

We're not gonna be able to build wind as fast as many system operator folks and system designers and forecast as expected. And that means there is gonna be a holding generation. And there's a question of what's gonna fill that gap? The one of the problems is that our coal fleet, of which there's only one unit on the one, station, I think it's still mainly online.

The it is so old and tired. These are really legacy bits of equipment, and so the refurbishment costs are massive. It's unclear. There is no real low hanging fruit of what we can pay to keep online, but then the nuclear fleet is code is already end of life or in life extensions.

Coal units are either off the grid now or, at the end of their days. And, we haven't got a new SIS GT for a long time. It's gonna be, The phrase squeaky bum time. It's gonna be extremely tight whether we can replace this generation time.

I don't even know what squeaky bum time means. I just said it. I do know what it means, but I don't know what it actually means. It's gonna be tricky. So I really share your concerns.

Have you a coal as as an aside? I really love coal power stations. Have you have you ever been around one? Yes.

One. I just And it was They match it would be problematic. The mechanical engineer, as a mechanical engineer, I loved it, What horrified me was the it was Didcot, actually, before they closed it, was that there was a train coming in with two thousand tons of coal. And when it was running at full power, it needed ten of those trains every single day.

To supply it. So it's getting through twenty thousand tons of coal every single day. I make mister make mistakes. It's a dirt coal stations are dirty, but then I think force generally fossil fuel stations are dirty.

Yeah. I don't I think there's much less difference between them people say. But as I said, as a mechanical engineer, it was a I love big bits of power machinery and giant steam turbines, and the amount of energy that you get out of them is for the space they use up. It's They're very compact.

I don't buy the fact that they're much more compact than wind farms because I say go and look at an opencast coal mine, then you'll see that you're not really comparing light with light. You need to come if you wanna talk about land usage, let's have both sides of the equation for color. Yeah. Yeah.

They're fascinating places also because a lot of them were built in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. And so they knew how to build control rooms back you go into the control room. There's no it's it's it's all analog. Pre digitization.

A lot of them are they've got like an art deco feel to them. It is I don't know. These analog dials that kind of wobble around the place. It's got all the stuff that as an engineer gets you really excited apart from, of course, the carbon that releases.

But, yeah, I do share your enthusiasm for coal stations in general. It's a shame lots of people. We've got one left I think if you get a chance to go around it, please do go and have a look around it. It's fascinating.

Well, there's another conversation. Is Drax a coal unit or not? Where there's a, it's a convey diagram.

There's a Venn diagram somewhere. If someone could be kind enough to draw it, that would be great. So James, you did great end of the show. You gave us a contrarian view, wanna say thank you for taking the time to speak to us, and we will be rooting for you on the sidelines.

We'll share the details of your crowd cube and your awesome video about how you make these things. And if you like this conversation and you wanna hear more, do hit like, subscribe, and all of those buttons, it gets us It gives us the motivation to carry on. Alright. Take care, and we'll see you next time.

Thank you,