Why Megawatts Aren’t Enough in Modern Power Systems with Lucie Kanius-Dujardin (NHOA)

Picture the scene. A new battery project gets built. It's on-site. The containers are there. The cells are installed, and then it doesn't make revenue for six months.

Not because prices moved, not because the market changed, but because the system didn't integrate cleanly. Control, inverters, grid requirements, it all matters.

By the time it's live, a whole revenue window has gone.

That's the kind of problem this episode is all about. Today's guest is Lucy, executive vice president at Noah Energy. Her team design, deliver, and operate battery systems around the world, not just the hardware, but everything that makes them work. She makes a point that cuts through a lot of the battery hype.

A project can lose more money from one percent of downtime than it ever saved by shaving off costs upfront. Because batteries don't earn value by existing, they earn it by being available, by responding correctly, by doing what the grid asks every second they're called on. For Lucy, building the battery is the easy part. Making them work is where projects succeed or fail.

This episode isn't about battery chemistry. It's about execution.

I'm Ed Porter. Welcome back to transmission.

Hello, Lucy, and welcome to transmission.

Hi, Ed. Thank you for welcoming me on transmission podcast.

My pleasure. And as ever, let's start off with you introducing yourself, but also introducing Noah, the company that you work for.

So I'm Lucy Kenyon Sejardin. I'm the global managing director of Noah Energy. I've been spending roughly fifteen years in the energy sector, more recently on the renewable and batteries activities. So we are a global provider of battery energy storage system.

We are delivering our system our turnkey solution. We include the balance of plants, the HE substation, and we deliver that around the world, been almost four gigawatt hours. We're delivering now one of the few non Chinese suppliers of BNF tier one recorded players, and we are trusted by several players, utilities, IPP, like StarCraft, Macquarie, NG, and many others. Okay.

And I'm privileged to manage a team that is delivering our, what we call, our three pillar or value proposition. The first one is technology, really basically putting together a mix of technology, whether proprietary or third party together and ensuring we can deliver the right solution for our clients, then the delivery pillar. The delivery pillar is basically saying technology is not enough. You need to put things on the ground.

You need to deliver it to our client. And then after, we follow them on the long term, and we service those assets. So simple, but not that easy.

Yeah. Yeah. Simple in concept. Right? But, like, a little bit harder when you get under the the skin of it.

Maybe I had two questions from just that that first introduction. So the first one was, you mentioned that you install these assets. Right? So you mentioned the HV portions, the high voltage portion, and you also mentioned that you are you're putting in, like, your system.

If if if we if we think about sort of the LEGO bricks that are a battery site, so what what would you say is like a standard solution for you?

Yeah. A standard solution will include practically on the technology side, the batteries, what we call the DC block that we buy on the shelf and select from a third party battery OEM. And then after we have a big piece, that come at site already delivered plug and play that includes the PCS, the PPC, the MV transformer, and we put on top of this basically the delivery model, meaning that putting this together once it's not at site and execute it, it doesn't work practically. So this is what we do.

Okay. So so you're essentially doing everything from the battery up to MV?

And, actually, we are delivering more and more HV substation as well. So when I speak by delivery, we mean that, basically, you need to do the civil work, the installation, and the interconnection. Often, more and more of the system are getting bigger and bigger that need to include the HV substation. So we've been delivering several HV substation around the world, in Australia, but as well in other countries Okay. On our projects.

Okay. So I think that's really helpful for listeners just to get an idea of, like, where you sit in this process. Right? So you're you're getting everything on-site, installed, and operating from the battery up to wherever you pass over to the network, whether that's high voltage or or HV or medium voltage MV. Okay. And you also mentioned tier one supplier. What what does what does that mean for people who are sort of outside the space?

What works well is that our clients are happy. If you speak with our client, they will tell you that, yeah, working with Noah was a a secured solution for them because we delivered on time on the on budget their project. So this is what is really a good player. Being tier one today, everybody refer to it to ensure that there's a right bankability and confidence in the players because there is a big market coming in with several players. So it's more reference for people.

Okay. So it's just a way of like assessing whether people have delivered to four, whether they've got a good track record and Right. Obviously, Noah has that as well as others in the market, but like I I think it's important to to to say. Okay. Very good. Let so let's let's move on to the market side because a lot has changed and it also varies country to country. So in markets like the UK and continental Europe, how are the use cases for batteries changing?

Yeah. So I think when everything started, players starting to look at single revenues for their projects. Now it's clearly a question of adaptability and stackability of revenues. If we take a step back on UK specifically, we remember in twenty sixteen, it was really the first frequency response program that was generalized in Europe and allowed to create the bankability and the revenue visibility for players to invest.

But rapidly, there were other revenue stream coming in. Yeah. And we've seen actually also batteries being able to play in the capacity market, and then we are seeing now the Elders. So revenue stream are always changing.

And it's unrealistic to believe that we will build a battery, and it will operate for five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. Today, we are being asked to deliver a system that should hold for twenty years.

It's unrealistic. We don't know what will happen in five, ten years, so it's really the adaptability need. And we've seen this as well in Italy. In Italy, it was clearly a bit late situation compared to the UK.

We've seen the fast reserve auction in twenty twenty

Where actually NOAA delivered roughly one fourth of the capacity. But we see that the asset that were delivered in this period is now gathering other type of revenues, and we even help some existing client to upgrade their system to capture other type of revenues. So it's really a question of adaptability to a more long duration services that we are seeing more and more. Yeah. If you look at Italy, for example, the MaxSay scheme is now targeting between six and eight hours between the players that have been awarded.

So it kind of changed the dynamics. You may need to have some augmentation of your battery. You may need to do some upgrade of your control system. So it's interesting. You never get bored, I would say.

You do. That is certainly true for the battery space. You mentioned Eldes very quickly, so that's long duration energy storage. That's the the I don't wanna say it's six hours or eight hours or ten hours because that's something of a of a moving number. I I also wanted to just to add an add an extra part to this. So you mentioned that you when you install a a site, you're thinking about say frequency response or you're thinking about energy trading.

Do you start to see things other power system qualities? So do you start to see things like voltage control or synthetic inertia? So as the group kind of configuring the inverters that are being put onto the site, do you start to think about these types of questions or or do people ask you for that?

Oh, yeah. Definitely. I think everybody's speaking about grid forming nowadays. It's funny, you know, like, maybe three, five years ago, no one was speaking about it, and now every everybody is doing grid forming.

We can speak about it for hours, but this is where we come from, this type of application. So we see more and more batteries as a core Part of the grid. And so it needs actually as much as renewable penetrating to compensate the need for synchronous. So, yes, we are adapting our service, and actually, our power plant controller is working more and more enabling those services.

And I think this is really interesting. Right? So so Noah started with more of a microgrid type structure. Right?

And when you think about microgrids, you sort of have to be grid forming. If you're the sort of largest component on that network and you're trying to support that particular network, you have to be good form be good forming because something has to be good forming. So people who come with that microgrid background have that knowledge around grid forming. And so the way the market is changing, does that does that feel like it's playing into some of your strengths?

Yeah. You're right. Noah really grew out of microgrid. So we deliver projects in place where it was nonnegotiable to be reliant.

We work in Ireland, in remote communities

In Tasmania, in very remote areas, you can see. And this is a place where we build our technology platform. So this is where we built our power plant controller PCS capabilities and developed those grid forming capabilities. So really the functionalities that we are seeing today as requested by the grid, but we also work on hybridization. So at that time, most of the projects were hybrid. For example, if we take a project we had in LiFu, a small island that was basically to run on solar, wind, biofuel, and batteries.

At that time, most of the business model, I would say ten years ago, was displacing diesel generator. And this is a big lesson learned that is enabling us today now that battery price fall down, penetration of renewable brought some more needs of, let's say, grid services similar to what we were seeing in microgrids. And so, naturally, Noah transferred its business to utility scale application. But each time we deliver a utility scale project, more and more we are being asked similar functionalities than what we were seeing in a in a microgrid.

If we look at renewables, analysts are expecting that by twenty thirty, we'll see mainly hybrid system coming online for new capacities.

And if you look at behind the meta application, TNI, it's all the same complexity of capabilities we've been developing at that time. So, yeah, definitely when people speak about grid forming as we were saying, we know what what what the market needs and what it means to make it happen.

I totally agree with you in terms of that that direction of travel. When you were mentioning hybrid solutions coming through, did you mean sort of hybrid in terms of, like, solar and solar and storage?

Is that is that what you Yeah.

Correct. Yeah. Hybridization of solar or wind plants. If you look at Australia where we are very active as well, most of the project we are seeing being kicking off for twenty twenty six will be probably fifty percent hybrid. And we believe that with the penetration of renewable Yeah. Even in Europe, we'll see more and more hybridization need simply because of curtailment. So it's really a purely economical strategy at one point.

Yeah. I think it it it makes these these kind of the the two elements are really interesting. I I think the the hybridization, so putting solar and storage together, feels like a really obvious way to try and get more out of the transmission network, which when we look at grids like Europe, we're seeing sort of really big cannibalization of say solar revenues and capture rates potentially going down to say thirty percent. So, you know, you you get paid a fraction of what you were expecting to get paid.

And then you say, well, look, let's add batteries to system to try and alleviate some of this. And you say, oh, sorry. We can't add batteries because we can't get connections. And you go, well, look, you've already got a connection.

And so can we can we think about ways of hybridizing to solve some of this faster without having to build all of this network from fresh? And I think some of that thinking that would probably be quite obvious in a microgrid scenario maybe needs to start coming through to some of these much larger grids.

I think a lot of companies now who have developed a big pipeline of solar mainly are looking at this business model. Even in Europe, it started in other countries, I would say, outside of Europe. But now a lot of players and a lot of IPPs are looking at hybridization of their system. So I would say if we looked at it two years ago, we clearly understood that regulation was around of stating we would develop the generation on one side, and we would develop the flexibility and security on the other side, managed separately, stating that generation and the need for flexibility may not be at the same point, okay, on the network. Now it's changing a bit, the approach, and I think this is mainly driven by the price of battery falling down. Definitely. If you look at economics, it's hard to make sense today.

It's often called like the domino effect. Right? Exactly. So as costs fall, the sort of batteries keep on finding their way into more and more markets where at higher prices, it wouldn't have worked, but at lower prices, it's obvious that you can put batteries in there. Yeah. And so when you start to see batteries do things like voltage control or synthetic inertia or maybe you're retrofitting a a site, those sort of new services or new installations, what what has Noah learned about bringing some of those batteries online? How do you do this really well?

I believe the market is very focused on batteries. We speak batteries, batteries, but batteries is not only a battery. It's if you look at the batteries energy system as a body. Maybe the batteries are just the leg, I would say.

If we speak about the best anatomy, maybe a weird way to to look at it. But then after, you have, of course, all the PCA as a transformer that's really mainly the core of your body that is converting all this energy. And then you have really the brain, and the brain is your power plant controller to ensure that all the system is working well together. So while I believe many people have been looking at batteries as a big chunk of the CapEx, naturally, it often underestimate the impact of other elements in this entire system and in this entire model.

If you look at the power plant controller, it may represent one percent on the total CapEx, but it delays insanely commissioning. It creates large underperformance of several players of the market. So at NOAA, we really try to enable our partners in choosing the best batteries that exist on the market and providing them a solution, very plug and play, easy, that we will support them to deliver at site and to and to operate. And this solution, we call it the Nexus, practically. So it's a bit our big marketing world where we bring together the PCS, the power plant controller, the transformer, and they will work together and enable, basically, to select the best batteries to connect together and to perform the right services that you want on your system. I think if you look at it today, the necessity and the complexity of our system compared it was before, it really bring additional difficulties and complexity while delivery system and operating it and need expertise on this segment.

Okay. And you mentioned PCS quite a few times, and I think just fulfill fulfilled us, we should say that that's the inverter.

That's the inverter.

That people people sort of may may use different languages. Right? And and I think what's really interesting about what you've said is that sometimes you might have some OEMs or EPCs that or or installers of these big projects, if I use more sort of simple language, who have found that when they installed this system in country x, it was fine and it worked. But now they're being asked to install it in a a new country, and there's new legislation, new rules, new grid codes. And so even though their thing works, their PCS or their controller works, it's not compatible with the sort of the local rules of that particular grid or network. Do do you see that happening quite often?

Yeah. It does. Actually, if you look at the market, it's really a standardization of products that we see nowadays and the expectation that one solution could work in one market while the other one would not. Actually, there is a lot of engineering work behind it to make it work and to be compliant for specific grid codes, specific requirement functionalities.

I know our team is spending quite extensive time to do so and to be compliant. We can take example of the stability passfinder, for example, in Scotland closer to us, which is very complex system to make it work together. We can speak about Australia where there is a commissioning process that is super extensive and demanding, I would say, that require really understanding and showing that You will deliver what you were asked to perform in details. So it's not the same, really.

And if we speak to our engineers at NOAA, someone who have been working a project in the UK may not have the skill set yet to work in Australia. So there is really a transfer of knowledge that needs to be earned each time. So everybody say when you enter Australia, for example, you will fail once, and then after, you may make it work. Yeah.

We've been lucky. We haven't been failing. It hasn't been easy, however.

But I think everybody is experiencing it when they move from an American market to European market or to an Australian market each time to change.

And I think that's a kind of critical thing. Right? So when people are looking to deploy those projects, finding someone who has done some of it before or has, like, has a concept of how different each market is is is a really important piece. Maybe let's then ask that question more directly. So how would you say if you were trying to kind of compare Noah to other EPCs, but also people who would install on-site, but also people who would create equipment, for example, the inverter that we've been talking about, how would you say NOAA is different to some of the other major integrators?

Yeah. So we we don't define ourselves as integrator or OEM. We really are fundamentally a delivery and service company that can provide, thanks to our background of engineering, the system to run and operate for several years. Most of integrator went to a trend of productivising their batteries.

While on our side, I think we have three differentiating point. First, we love making things happen. So meaning that we love to build stuff. So delivering is really a model for us.

I think a lot of people are underestimating the challenge of delivering. But today, if you look at all the project, if you speak with many people, the issue they've been facing are rarely on the DC block of the battery itself, but in putting things down on time, on budget, without issues. And this is a big coordination work that people need to invest on. And at NOAA, we love doing this, and we have been structuring the company to deliver on turnkey, you know, those business.

Then after the second thing is we love operating our site. A lot of people see it as a pain point, you know, to stay on the long term, seeing as little money to be made, a lot of people to manage because you need people Yeah. To to manage our site, while we see it as a big value. Because this is where we create the real trust on the long term with clients.

We get repeat business. A lot of our clients today are clients with who we've been delivering already. One, two, three projects. So this is something that works well.

And finally, we love people. We believe that our business is impossible without people. We grew our organization, especially since the last year, extensively globally, and we worked a lot on the organization itself, how we can perform well, and the human capital element of it. I like to refer to the CEO of NVIDIA because it's very trendy Of him saying that we will need thousand, probably more of electrician.

And it's true. We need to find those people, but those people are not easy to find. So how do we attract them? How do you train them?

How do you you do you retain them? It's really is a challenge to them. So at NOAA, what we've done is we have a big part of the training chunk. So we are welcoming every year a graduate program.

So this is really the fresh graduate people to the listener. Don't hesitate to apply for the next one, where we will become engineers, and they are being trained across different team in our organization to be able to have the overall view of our business of delivering batteries. And, however, we continue to train them on as it goes. Our business is changing so much that you need some training not only on engineering technical ground, but also on the project management.

Then after, we are true believer in curiosity, accountability, ownership of people so they can grow themselves. And this is something that has been working well. So while people think that delivery is super complex, servicing is boring and takes time, they see people as a cost to reduce. At NOAA, we really invest on this ground, and this is where we believe we are different compared to some of our peers on the market.

Okay. And I I think if you to try and put some sort of numbers and context on this. Right? So if you're if you're sort of sat outside the battery world and you go, oh, look.

Well, why haven't we installed ten gigawatts in this location this year or whatever, twenty gigawatts in all of the US? Like, whatever that number may be, we track those numbers. And nearly always, we are about twenty five percent behind what we should be installing in any particular year. There's nearly always one or two gigawatts that are behind the installation date.

And the reality is that those things that you're talking about, those those thorny rules, those thorny configurations, the testing, the relationships that you may need to hold with a network operator, all of those things mean that if you don't have the right people who have the right context and the right training, your project will get behind time. And you will lose money for that because you're gonna be coming on six months, nine months later than you than you should have been. So we I mean, the data definitely shows that there's a really big issue and perhaps one that's an underestimated.

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Enjoy the conversation.

Now going from the very sort of detailed side of grid integration to the massive side of supply chain, obviously, countries like China own a lot of the supply chain for battery manufacturing and also for for solar as well. How how do you sort of work alongside China in order to make sure that your customers are getting the best products?

Today, our model, as I explained you, is really selecting the best batteries on the market and enabling them by putting maybe more the brain and the core of the system together with those batteries.

We have very good relationship with different battery OEM, and we continue overlooking at the progress and the evolution of the market. It's really a question of testing, assessing what are the right players, what we consider as tier one players that we can rely on and we can rely on the long term as well for guaranteeing us the performance that we are working on.

I see a very big, discussion at the moment in term of supply chain management, especially through the geopolitical aspect that has been, let's say, in light by the US, evolution in the last, months.

Europe, I think what we are seeing today is there is a good mix between the approach of doing a mix of batteries coming from China or enabling the production of batteries. In Europe, if you look at the latest Feder, Spanish auction or not auction, but subsidies mechanism, they are valuing basically production made in Europe, but at the same time valuing what is done outside of Europe and doing kind of a mechanism of counting down the subsidies according to this that could enable a balanced scheme. Yeah. If we speak about investing into batteries, manufacturing in Europe, it's clearly something that we've seen in the past month.

It has been difficult for Europe to catch up, and there's a lot of more investment from China in Europe to enable this evolution when needed for local content. However, as I say, battery is not only about batteries. Battery system is about a full wider technology stream. We see inverters that have been manufactured, developed since several years in Europe with very well established manufacturer in Europe.

I don't see why we should not enable this already manufacturing ground in Europe.

We I'm definitely expect to see some of those big names, big brands looking to have man manufacturing bases in Europe, but I think that's that's very likely to happen.

I think I I I really like your approach, which is to say that there are some really core components like the DC block that we're very happy to go and get from whoever we think is the sort of best provider of that looking across the competency of the equipment and also the cost of it and the deliverability and their their sort of status is like a tier one manufacturer of that. So we can go back to them and we can say, hey, look, this wasn't good enough and you'll be able to get another one or get your money back, however it might be.

And then you're saying, well, look, we can then do some of the software, some of the how this system thinks, to your analogy, the brain of the thing that you're going to install, you own and and and and you would put into the the the particular site. And I think that's a really kind of nice way to think about how you would work with someone as as sort of dominant in the supply chain as Chinese manufacturers of battery systems.

I do have I have I kind of Yeah.

Partnership approach and how to make the best out of it, I would say.

Okay. I think that's a really nice way to think about it. So to then go on to the future. So to ask a question around where do you see the most rapid technological progress? So do you see it in sort of the cell technologies that would be part of the DC block that you were talking about earlier? What sometimes people call a bot, which is the balance of plants, so that's the stuff that's around the DC block.

System integration, so a lot of the work that you specialize in, or is it is it all about software? Are we is it just gonna be we've got millions or billions more data points, and we're just gonna be making so many better decisions with essentially the same DC block? Which of those do you kinda see moving fastest?

Yeah. The fastest still remain, I think, on the sale part. Yep.

We've seen an increase in ampere hour and energy density of the sales in the past months, year. We thought for a moment there would be a stabilization at two hundred eighty ampere hours. But then rapidly, there has been an acceleration. We've seen announcement at three hundred fourteen, then after now, well beyond five hundred ampere hour sales.

I believe it's a challenge, you know, for developers, owners, EPCs to integrate and and to keep the pace. So this is really something at NOAA we try to keep pace on, and, it's a work that require a lot of collaboration. We are speaking about collaboration with battery OEM, and this is really what we try To do because we see this evolution going very fast. And if we need to be on time on the market, deliver the best product and the best solution to our partners on time, we need to be flexible and adaptable.

So how do we do it?

Maybe just to just to people may not think in AMP hours too often. So maybe just to kind of give people a concept of, like, what's the difference between, like, a two hundred and eighty amp hour and a one thousand amp hour cell?

It's really the density of of the cell itself. So, basically, in the same container, you will have more energy. So what is very important for people today is as we see longer duration of, the system, there is an objective to denser the system itself. So on the same plot of land, you will be able to have more of it. So it's that much important for players today.

And that can mean sort of easier connection for that system. Right? So if you can get more energy into a single cell Yeah. Then you're sort linking up fewer components. Right?

Of course.

And so the sort of system integration becomes a little bit cheaper when you're going from sort of cells to the DC block.

Yeah. And even at sales level, the denture of it make it cheaper in the product itself, less connection and also in this, let's say, rush for, competitiveness that we've seen mainly between, battery OEM. We've seen indeed the need to, get those numbers ramping up rapidly.

What it means, however, it's mean that, how reliable it is, how much we can guarantee performance on the long run with such a fast change is a big question. So on our side, we take a lot of time. You know? As I like to say, we don't sell data sheets.

We say something that works for real. So we test different solution. We have a lot of discussion with battery OEM. We visit their laboratory.

We visit their research center, look at the prototype. We order samples that we test in Cosio in Italy in our testing facility where we have several battery line of test. And then after, we are able only to deliver it. So it takes a bit of time.

So if you don't have those deep connection and relationship, it's easy to lose the pace as I was speaking.

The language of someone who has built these projects before, has had to look at projects that have, for whatever reason, not being delivered on time or have gone wrong. And yeah. So so this this is kind of, think what I'm getting is a message around making sure that you're working with the right counterparty so that when you do deliver something, it is fit for purpose. You don't fall behind time. You don't have a lack of availability because, yes, you can squeeze an extra five or ten percent out of your CapEx, but that's not that helpful if you lose ten percent of availability per year or Definitely. Your OpEx is significantly higher because you're having to make many more replacements because the kit you've sort of bought isn't the right thing.

Definitely. We are doing a lot of sensitivity analysis of the IRR, so really the return, what money you will make with your assets, with our partners. And we see that, like, even just small delays of the project can make you lose insane amount of money or just underperformance. You were speaking about availability.

So How often you are you have a downtime of your system. And this has a huge impact. We discussed with some client. One percent of availability can impact potentially much more on CapEx upfront.

So there is a good equilibrium in making work together, this equation. And at NOAA, we have, like on our all our overall fleet, we have been delivering in the last months more than ninety nine percent availability. And I think there are not many people who are able to say so, but I think it's really the combination of technology, delivery, and service that really allow together to have such a a performance.

It's this fascinating part, right, where people think that battery manufacturing is very much sort of comes out of a supply comes out of a long supply chain, goes on-site, plug it in, off you go. In reality, there is a lot around the sort of optimization of that system, duration, availability, the spec capacity that sits within it, How do you comply with the rules of the particular location? There is so much more that comes to light as you get deeper into the business case.

I think it comes from the solar industry. You know? I I I say, from the renewable industry and mainly on solar side, and solar was easy.

Battery is fun.

Battery is much more complex.

When you transfer from solar industry to battery industry, you realize how much the complexity Is bigger in term of technology itself, evolution of the technology, of course, but also in term of revenue stream, you can capture out of it. And a lot of people are actually very fascinating, and this is why everybody in the industry, I think, is having so much fun.

There we go. Solar is easy. Batteries are fun. I I will I will borrow that, I'm sure. Okay. Let me move on to final two questions. So is there anything that you would like to plug?

Yeah. I think I spoke about it. So we have been growing. We are structuring our company.

We are always looking for talents to join us. We put a lot of effort in growing people internally, but we also Plug in people and expertise. So if you have expertise in engineering, high voltage, balance of plants, overall expertise in control, or anything else, please look at our website. Yeah.

We have some job offers open always.

And is that is that globally, or is it sort of mostly in It's globally.

We have four hubs. So one in the US, one in Europe, one in Asia, and one in Australia. So we have office all around world, and our team are happy also to be able to travel around the world, not only for delivering project, but for doing their life in other countries. It's nice.

There we go. Have fun with batteries and travel around the world. It's a it's a good pitch. Okay. And then I'll come to you. Is there a contrarian view that you hold?

Yeah. I I I think I've been already underlying several contrarian views saying that don't look only at the battery. Look at the overall system that can work and that can impact overall your performance. But I would like to return the question to you, Ed. And As you've been interviewing many people, on this podcast, I'm interesting to see from you what are the player experiencing as pain point today? Because we like to solve pain points, so I like to hear from you.

What are the pain points that people find in the market today? I would say, often it's revenue. Right? So you have this kind of the revenue forecast that look to see how the world will develop and it's sort of, okay, you you may see seventy, eighty pounds, whatever it is.

And then actually delivering against that revenue, I think that can be underestimated. So for example, in in the UK, and we talked about it in this conversation already that people get obsessed with the the connections queue and this rush to get stuff connected. But the reality is that once you get it connected, is it actually going to make the money that you thought it would? And so I would I mean, always we we we think about revenue forecasts a lot.

And so I would always say, you're, you know, making sure you've you've really thought through the sort of sustainability of your business case, what your battery is going to be doing. I would say that's one of the really big pain points. It's maybe not a contrarian view as such, but it's it's certainly something that people think about.

I would say maybe some of the pain points that people will have this year that I'm really excited about would be things like batteries just going beyond just the frequency response and just the wholesale trading. So I think people will try and use their their battery brain a little bit more to borrow your analogy. So thinking about things like doing voltage control or synthetic inertia or could they do smart things alongside solar with colocation make the most out of grid connection points they have? I think some of those things will come through this year.

I hope they will. I'm not just talking about GB here. I'm talking about Europe and and US as well as well as Australia. Australia, for example, we see, you know, fifty percent of batteries going in with grid forming inverters now.

I think that one very, you know, sort of front running in this. So those are some of the pain points I think I see.

Exciting. Think it's a good topic to be taken for twenty twenty six and and even beyond.

Yes. Yeah. Exactly. So so there's there's loads in there. I also hear a lot of contrarian views.

Oh. So I maybe I'll I'll give you I'll give you two of my favorites Okay. Just as a wrap up. One, we had Nat Bullard on a long time ago who said that he thought the last five percent of the energy transition might be quicker than the first ninety five percent, which I think about quite a lot.

And and I'm still don't know whether I think it's right or not, but but I like it.

And we also had Bex Showered from I see it's challenging because we were discussing a bit of the record before the podcast about how to actually electrify some C and I business and how Yeah.

Specific to each of the business case and each of the players Exactly. In the industry process to make happen.

I think usually ninety five percent is is easier, but interesting to discuss and to debate.

Exactly. But then I I think where it sort of it's it's it's get should get due credit is that some of the things that we rely upon today, like the availability of gas or the availability of diesel, may not be so easy. So let's say we're talking about twenty fifty, twenty sixty. Like, can you actually get just a very straightforward diesel solution?

If you're yeah. If if if you've kind of always worked in that way, actually, would it just be easier to have a slightly less efficient, let's say, battery and solar system versus, say, a diesel in a world where diesel is not as commonplace as it is today? So that's a bit of a thinker. It's always stayed with me.

And I I've always and I liked we had Sherwood on recently from Field who talked about that the industry sometimes takes for granted that we need to do things that are good for the climate and things that are good for and I'm I'm sort of slightly changing her words a little bit, but I think this is kind of where it comes from, that we take it for granted that people are on board with just doing things that are good for the climate. And in reality, we need to take a lot more responsibility for helping people to come along the way to understand that it's sort of good for economics, good for their local environment, but also kind of hearing them when they say that's that's quite a big change for this particular part of of of the world.

And I think as as the industry, if we don't talk about what we're doing in terms of it being good for economics, good for the climate, that type of thing, like there is a gap that gets left and that gap gets filled with Russian bot from, you know, on on Twitter or X or whatever it is that will now say something and that that's probably being totally dismissive of the argument and and that's exactly what Bex is talking about. So I've fallen right there into the same trap. But there are things like that where I think we need to do so much more.

And so I really like those two, and they've kind of I agree.

And I think on the coming from the renewable industry in the past, I think there has been one thing that has been a bit overlooked is how we onboard everybody. And it's not because you are providing renewable energy that people will be already onboard, and it was very conflicting against other technology as well, seeing renewable as the only solution while it's actually a mix that you have and you have to onboard the entire, industry to change. And this impact people life as well on a day to day basis. So I agree it's not an easy one to, to to align and to align planets for everybody.

So there we go. A a fun a fun wrap up. And, Lucy, just to say thank you very much for coming on Transmission. You've been a wonderful guest, and we wish you the best of luck in twenty twenty six and all your endeavors.

Thank you very much, Ed, for having us.