29 - Improving Europe's renewable infrastructure - with Hannah Staab (Head of Advisory for Europe, Natural Power)

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Hello, Hannah. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

If anyone's listening, again, this is another one I've been one of those people asking for rain for weeks. Like, oh, please rain, please rain. And now it has, and it's really, really loud outside. So yeah, we're going to do this with the backdrop of some relaxing raindrop noises.

We've got Hannah Staab on from Natural Power. Hannah, thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

And today we're going to talk about all sorts of stuff--

wind and solar parks, or hybrid parks--

parks is the new word--

and what you do at Natural Power, and generally what's going on in co-located batteries. So Hannah, do you want to just introduce yourself? What do you do? Where do you come from?

And yeah, how do we know each other?

Yeah, hi. The rain is great. I'm also happy that it's raining, even though I got absolutely soaked on the way here.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: If you can hear squelching, that is my shoes.

That is my trainers, yeah.

But yeah, we know each other from pretty much a few years of just being in the battery industry, going to the same events, talking to each other about revenue stacking and what's new for the UK market.

I have been in the renewable industry for about 10 years. I started out working for a developer, and then I've been working in Natural Power for the last five years.

So Natural Power is a technical and engineering consultancy. We work exclusively on renewable energy and clean storage projects.

We are originally from Scotland, although I'm based in London. And we're about 450 people worldwide, so focused on the kind of UK, European, and US markets.

And Natural Power only works on natural power stuff, right? So it's only renewables and clean stuff.

HANNAH STAAB: The name is a giveaway, yeah.

That's important, right?

HANNAH STAAB: We wouldn't work on gas beakers, for example. That's not natural enough for.

Is there another consultancy that can say that? Another one that's so--

I'm sure there are, but--

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Ever [INAUDIBLE]?? Do they only do--

K2, I think, maybe do offshore wind, or wind energy. So there are others.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: That's pretty strong. It's pretty strong.

Yeah. I think we've definitely seen a consolidation in consultancies in the market where others have been sort of absorbed by bigger companies who also work on wider infrastructure and energy projects. So we're very proud of being independent and also purely having that renewable net zero transition focus.

Yeah.

Props, and you guys have been doing it since the 90s, right? So Natural Power's been going on pretty long time, based in Scotland. And you do some operational stuff, as well, don't you? And some asset management stuff? Do you want to talk about that?

Yeah. So we have a surprisingly high tech control center in the middle of nowhere in Scotland in Dumfries and Galloway where we look after probably about a quarter of the Uk's onshore wind fleet, plus some batteries at the moment. So a lot of that is around managing the data flows, managing projects, operating the balancing mechanism, doing kind of access and egress management.

So yeah, all the kind of day-to-day data management, and more and more of the sort of performance analysis and reporting on operational sites in the UK.

And that's in--

I guess we should probably put a link in the show notes, but that's like a Teletubbies, hobbit-style building in the middle of nowhere where I guess there's some people who sit there with a lot of screens controlling and monitoring stuff, right?

Yeah, yeah. So we call it the greenhouse. It's our global headquarters in the middle of nowhere in Dumfries Galloway with a green roof, hence the name.

And like I said, it is really high tech, and lots of screens for 24/7 operations. We're, I think, one of the only private control centers in the UK that has a direct line to National Grid. And it's literally a sort of red phone type situation where they can call us if they need us to curtail windfarms, because we manage that much capacity through this control center.

And what does that mean? So a quarter of all the onshore wind in the UK. What does that mean in numbers? How many wind turbines is that? Or how many megawatts, gigawatts, is that? Putting you on the spot here.

You're asking me that. Yeah. I actually think that changes so much every year. I'm not sure what the latest stat is on onshore wind capacity in the UK.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: But it's a lot.

It's a lot. It's definitely more than batteries, although batteries are also growing hugely. But yeah, there's a lot of wind around in the UK.

Here comes that. There's so many wind people who are constantly digging at batteries for being so much smaller.

I'm not going to put you in that group, but that was the first strike, kind of.

All right. So yeah, what else does Natural Power do? You guys do control center stuff.

You look after the wind turbines. You look after batteries. But your bit of the business, you do some pretty high-tech consultancy stuff. What's happening there?

Yes. I head up our due diligence advisory team. So what we do is all about helping investors and lenders actually fund these projects and make them happen. And we sort of act as the independent technical expert that looks at the projects, or the portfolios, or the platforms, whatever's being transacted upon, and tell them where the risks are and how they can mitigate them.

So it's all about figuring out, are these viable projects? Are they in line with industry best practice? If there are issues, which inevitably every project, 90% of projects, but pretty much every project has issues, how do you mitigate those? How can you get around them? How can you bake in contingencies or work on a way to resolve them to make sure you still have a viable project?

And the company has 450 people? We're going to talk about what you work on in a second. But there's 450 people ish in the company, and you're in the UK, and you're elsewhere too, right?

Yeah. So majority of our staff are based in the UK. We have another office in Dublin. So we've got maybe 20 people there. And then offices in France and in the US, so East Coast, West Coast, and central. So yeah, kind of growing all over. We've also got a few people in the Nordics and Poland, so trying to grow internationally, but our core markets are definitely Western Europe and the US.

And who's the customer for the work that you guys do? Is it asset owners? Or is it more banks and lenders? Or is it developers? Who do you work for?

It's really across the range. Natural Power, one of the things we like to say is that we support people across the whole lifecycle of projects. So if we're looking at early stage development, our clients would be developers who need help figuring out if the project's feasible and what it might look like, help even signing up land and actually talking to landowners, help getting the planning consent, so doing all the kind of environmental studies, ecology.

We've got people who go out in boats and count marine mammals for offshore wind farms, which I personally am quite jealous of. I think in another life, that would be the job that I'd want so it's either.

It's either marine mammals or it's bats, right? That's the two things you got to look for with wind farms. Or newts.

Newts, also very popular.

What are they called? Great crested?

Great crested newts. You don't want them on your site.

So yeah, the whole planning and development support piece. And then we have a big construction team who would help with the construction management of projects. So being the client's representative on site, making sure contractors are doing what they're meant to do, keeping track of budget and timescales, and actually just running around with a hard hat and high-vis and making sure these projects get built.

And are you able to give some examples of the kind of customers that you guys work with?

Sure.

I mean, it's anything from, primarily work on some large scale front of the meter project. So that can include utilities, we've worked with StarCraft, with SSE, Scottish Power, ESB.

We work with more private developers, the likes of Community Windpower is one that has wind power in the name, but they've also started do solar and storage now. SMS Energy.

I feel like I went a bit hard on the start about wind. So we did a podcast recording just before this one, and yeah, I think I've got a bit of a chip on my shoulder today about wind. But it's OK. It's OK. I take it all back.

Well, it's no small storage players. We've worked with SMS Energy on some of their battery projects.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: They've got two now, right? Two big ones.

Two big ones, yeah. I'm sure more coming down the pipeline.

So yeah, I know a lot of the work we do is because it's transactional related. It's somewhat confidential.

Yeah. I understand. OK, let's get into the nuts and bolts for it. So I want to talk today about co-location, because you guys are doing loads of work on co-location. And it's a hot topic because I think probably that's, well, about five years, really, co-location has been a word that we've bandied around a lot. And still, we're not getting the kind of assets built out yet.

So there's a lot of sites that have got planning for solar that's got planning for a battery, or batteries got plenty for solar. And still, we're only seeing one side of it get built out at the moment. And I'm interested to know why you think that is, and what's changing in the future.

I probably have a bit of a different perspective on that because we have been working on a lot of these hybrid projects. And absolutely, it's a small fraction of the total pipeline. But there are definitely projects, and there have been for years, projects that have been built out on a happily operating in that hybrid basis.

I do have some stats here, because I looked them up. At the moment, about 10% of the UK's operation battery fleet is co-located. And that's not a lot. That's less than 200 megawatts. That is a small number. But if you look at the pipeline of development projects, I think it goes up to something like 20% of batteries that are currently in the pipeline that will be planned to be co-located with other forms of technology.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: 10%

And that's like gigawatt scale, then. 20% of the current pipeline is a lot.

So I know there's the SSE one, which is next to wind. And then there's the something farm, the old NESCO one.

HANNAH STAAB: The ones that everyone knows about--

And the 10, right?

Yeah. The ones that people know about is the NESCO one, which is called Clay Hill, I believe.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Clay Hill, yeah.

That was, I think, the first subsidy-free solar farm and the first co-located solar and storage project. So that made a lot of waves. I think they had politicians cutting the ribbon, and all of that. It was a really cool [INAUDIBLE]

project. Vattenfall have done at least one in Wales, where we actually had them do the planning consent. That's a site called [INAUDIBLE]

Point, I believe.

Penny C, we call it.

HANNAH STAAB: Penny C, yeah.

[INAUDIBLE]

pronounced the [INAUDIBLE].. Yeah.

And that's quite a chunky battery for the time, at least. I think it's a 20 megawatt battery there co-located with a wind farm. And then there are others, solar and storage. You've got [INAUDIBLE]

that's going to be coming into construction now. That made a lot of news for being the first what we call the TCO project, or solar farm that's so big it had to be consented under a special national planning regime. And that has hundreds of megawatts of storage co-located.

So is storage actually getting built on that?

HANNAH STAAB: Sorry?

So they're going to build--

they are actually going to build the storage on that?

As far as I know. We actually supported Quinn Brook when they acquired that project, which was last year. And certainly, the conversation we have with them at the time, the plan was to build out both together.

We need to put it on a database, then. Yeah, and there's the Unite Cost one that's next to high wind, isn't there? There's a 1 megawatt [INAUDIBLE]

there.

HANNAH STAAB: There's one called Back Wind, which is, I think, the first one. Yeah, great name.

We should do, like, a dingbats of this at Christmas or something like that. And then I think that's about it at the moment. There's 200 megawatts out of that. We need to find these.

I think you're right that the fact that we can rattle off a good number of them on one hand means that it is still a fairly new concept. And you're also right that what we see now, the majority of solar farms put into planning with provision for battery storage, often that's just a little square on your layout drawing saying, and we might want to put storage here at some point, with no intention to immediately build it out, but sort of keeping that in reserve for future if they wanted to add it.

Which in itself, I think, is meaningful and interesting, because it means that these developers do see the market going that way, and they might feel--

and I think this is a theme in the legacy renewable industry that have done generation development, wind and solar, no storage--

is like, they might not feel like they are ready or have the knowledge to themselves develop the battery, but they do see that it adds value.

And if they might want to sell the site at some point or once they have upscaled more in that area, they could add batteries in future without going through a complicated consenting process.

Yeah.

Absolutely. It's like selling a house with planning permission to put a bigger bathroom in, right? You don't necessarily need to do it. You just need a piece of paper--

HANNAH STAAB: That says you can.

Yeah. Who knows what happens. All right.

Sorry, just a last point. Like, I said Natural Power--

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Go ahead. Go.

HANNAH STAAB: Don't cut me off. No.

There's the whole behind the meter segment, as well, right? And that is one that the UK has never been, I would say, the strongest market for residential and behind the meter renewables and storage. It's not like Germany, where this is really taking off.

But it is also growing here, and particularly, the commercial industrial segment where people are having to deal with really high energy costs. And it's only going to get worse. There's a huge incentive there to put behind the meter generation and storage.

So I was hearing that apparently, if you want to do--

I'll ask you about German behind the meter now because you're German, and you're an expert. So I'm going to bring those. There's a Venn diagram here that's coming. Watch this.

But someone told me that apparently now, if you want to put domestic solar and a battery on your house, you essentially have to pay someone over the phone before they'll even speak to you, because there's such a demand to get these surveys done.

You have to pay a couple of hundred quid upfront just to get someone to come out to your house and even talk to you because there's so many people who want to go off grid, or want to be self-sufficient, if you like. It's quite exciting, really.

I think we talk about our industry being a roller coaster, but that's exactly the same on the residential behind the meter side, because you don't have the same subsidies and [INAUDIBLE]

tariffs in the UK that you had a few years ago. So all the infrastructure and the installers were there, and then really struggled when that support was cut because nobody was looking to do anymore.

And I think now with energy prices going where they're going and some of the things around VAT being applied or not applied, yeah. I mean, that demand is absolutely growing again. So I'm not surprised to hear that you have to pay, basically, to get someone to look at your roof and tell you what you can fit there.

HANNAH STAAB: And what's the deal with--

what's going on with behind--

I saw a graph from, I think it was Bloomberg New Energy Finance. And it was a standard hockey stick graph of battery storage stuff. But then it had a carve out for Germany, and then it had a carve out for behind the meter. And behind the meter was just so, so much bigger in Germany than front of the meter, and so much bigger in Germany than anywhere else in Europe.

Do you know what's caused that?

I think it's a combination, and probably a sort of self-perpetuating circle of cultural attitudes towards energy. And there's definitely a really strong green movement in Germany, and very much in the personal sphere of people wanting to become more autonomous, and reduce their own carbon footprint, and being very open to doing solar and storage in their homes.

The other thing is the housing stock there is much newer than it is here. So houses and properties are way more--

it's easier and more efficient to do that kind of behind the meter generation and storage because you're well-insulated. You tend to have a bit more space on a roof. Just things like that make it easier.

My parents actually have put in solar and storage, and actually also some solar thermal over the last year. So I've been in a position of being used as a private consultant for my parent in a segment that is not really what I do professionally.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Very dangerous move.

Absolute recipe for disaster.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: What have they gone for? They've gone for a Sonnen? They go for a Tesla?

They actually they went for a Sonnen system.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Oh, they look really nice.

And Sonnen, the company, is actually from a village that is about half an hour from where I grew up, in the middle of nowhere, in the Bavarian Alps. So that's a kind of home-grown German industry.

Do you think that's marketing, or product positioning? I don't think about the Sonnen a battery person. Sonnen battery gets my heart racing.

They look so, so cool. All right.

Right, then. Next question. What on Earth is an energy park? And why is everyone talking about them?

Yeah.

Energy park is one of these terms that sometimes gets thrown around. And I have a feeling that some governments and some local planning authorities really latched onto that.

I think Wales is a good example. There's loads of goodwill and support and incentive in Wales from the planning authorities to say, propose us an energy park. We don't just want a wind farm. We want an energy park.

And there are good reasons for that. If you just think about it practically, if you manage to stick a lot of infrastructure in the same site, you're kind of containing the visual impact, the noise impact, the environmental impact into one area. So in a situation where, particularly with wind, there can be a lot of opposition and concern on visual impact and noise, are typically the things that developers have to contend with and have to very carefully manage, as they should have to do, with the local community.

I think there's a school of thought that says, well, if you're going to build a wind farm here anyway and have to go through all of that, why not add solar? Why not add storage? Put it all in one place. It's all going to look more industrial, but at least it's going to be in one spot. So I think that's maybe the planning argument.

And the other obvious argument is grid. And you talk to any developer pretty much anywhere in Europe these days, they're all going to have a moan about grid.

And grid is the thing that makes development really difficult. It's really expensive.

As in connections.

As in connecting, finding a connection that you can actually export your power as a generator or as a voucher. You have access to both import and export. And that's because our grids were not built to have all this distributed intermittent renewable generation.

So particularly in the remoter parts of the country where the demand isn't so high, the grid is not set out to really take in huge amounts of power and capacity.

So having access to grid is really, really valuable. And if you have one of those grid connections, I think developers increasingly are like, well, how do I make the most of it? And again, that's where the energy park concept comes in. Rather than just putting a solar farm onto this grid connection where realistically, you're going to use that grid connection only during the day.

No. No. What?

HANNAH STAAB: Mind blown. But also, even during the day, you're only going to use the maximum limit of the grid connection during the peak--

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: During the boring bit. Yeah.

Yeah, during lunchtime if it's sunny.

And the rest of the day, you're actually seeing a lot of spare grid.

So not surprising that developers are thinking about, well, how do I use that spare capacity? And you can combine wind and solar. You can combine solar and storage. People are now talking about combining hydrogen and lots of other stuff, as well.

But yeah, it comes down to, how do you make the most of your grid connection? Also, spread the cost that frankly, is a big part of your construction cost, is actually paying for that grid connection. Spread it across multiple projects.

And so the word park just means co-location and big. Is big part of it? Or is it just a trendy way to describe co-location?

I think probably the park might come more from the fact that people also sometimes refer to a wind farm as a wind park.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Wind park. Power park.

It has a bit of a leisure connotation, doesn't it? And you do have sites like Scottish Power's one in Whiteley is a really good example, where it genuinely is a public recreation and leisure facility. There's cycling paths. You can walk around between the turbines. And they're looking to add solar there. They're developing or building out now a battery there. They're talking about hydrogen.

So it also maybe has that element of, it's a park in the way that a public park can be a good thing for people to go enjoy. Not everyone's an energy nerd like us.

I was going to say, do you know how out of touch we are? Because I can't--

the idea of that sounds great. I really want to go. And then we've got in the news, Liz Truss and whatever. And the winner of--

whoever wins the conservative election, leadership election, it sounds to me the one who says the craziest thing about everything, including solar now.

Yeah, maybe everybody doesn't want these parks to go and have the picnic in with little wind turbines. I do, anyway. I'd vote for that. So big co-located things with the word park on it.

And so you can do wind and battery. You can do solar and battery. You could do wind, solar, and battery and get a full house, or now you can also do hydrogen. So what's the what's the hydrogen gig all about on an energy park?

Oh, OK. Big question. And I feel like whenever you start talking about hydrogen, you might end up having an argument, because people have very different views on what hydrogen--

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: I know nothing.

Ultimately will be useful. So I'm going to park what is it going to be useful for, for a bit, and probably talk more about, why combine it with a traditional renewable something plus storage park? So hydrogen is great because it doesn't need a grid connection, because hydrogen is not electricity that you would want to put into the electricity grid. It is gas, and it's a good way of storing energy in gas form, and then do whatever you want with it.

So that's kind of what's driving the hydrogen space, is the fact that batteries are great as short term storage, but they're not going to be good at storing electricity for days, weeks, months, whereas we know we will need that. We know we have a really uneven pattern of seasonal demand and seasonal generation. So we need something ultimately to sort that out. And that's--

So what's the deal? So is it like a battery that's bigger than pumped hydro? Is that the sphere that we're in? We're like, pumped hydro, flow battery.

Sorry. You've got lithium ion. Then you got flow batteries, if that materializes, which hopefully it does. And then you've got bigger than that, which is like pumped hydro, [INAUDIBLE]

kind of stuff.

And then is the hydrogen storage thing the bit beyond that? Longer duration?

And when you say big, are you talking about storage? Like duration of storage? Or you just talking about scale?

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: You just called me out here. I'm just talking nonsense, aren't I?

I'm going to go with duration. Yeah, I'm going to go with duration.

HANNAH STAAB: Yeah. In principle, you can store hydrogen indefinitely.

It won't be lost or be less efficient. It can literally just sit there in tanks now. You don't want to build it--

so you want to size your storage capacity appropriately for when you're going to use it. But yeah, in the sense of duration, it is kind of unlimited.

And in terms of scale capacity, it is very scalable. You can have a 1 megawatt electrolyser plant, or you could build hundreds, gigawatt scale type project. It's like batteries in the sense that it's scalable and stackable.

And so the park, the energy park idea with hydrogen on it.

This is a fully green solution, right? This is green renewable power coming in through an electrolyzer, turning that electricity into--

well, no. That's not true. The electricity powering a chemical reaction that then creates hydrogen and outputs hydrogen.

And so is the idea of putting--

do these hydrogen facilities take up a lot of space, and that's why we want to put them all together? Or is it an efficiency thing? How does the business case work?

HANNAH STAAB: Yeah. There's two arguments for putting that electrolyser the hydrogen infrastructure next to your renewable generation. One is you then don't have to transport the electricity over kilometers, where you would lose power, and it'd be less efficient. You can just do it all on site.

And the other is that we talked about access to grids being scarce.

And so there might be projects that can export some of their power into the grid, but sometimes they'll be curtailed because the grid is too constrained, or they actually have more generation capacity than they're allowed to export. So during a particular windy period or particularly sunny period, they would have to reduce their output, and basically just lose energy that they otherwise could make money with.

So the idea with hydrogen is, rather than just turn your wind turbine down or turn your solar farm down, you use that excess electricity to make the hydrogen, and then it gives you another revenue stream. So ultimately that would be the business case, is sites that can't get access to the grid or the architecture to use that electricity that otherwise would be wasted to produce hydrogen, and then sell that hydrogen into various markets.

This is the controversial topic that I mentioned earlier. And then makes extra money.

Don't get me started on that.

All right. So no, I'm not going to say anything too controversial here. So can I still get a CFD on my offshore wind farm if I put a hydrogen electrolyzer next to it?

HANNAH STAAB: Yeah.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: What's the deal there?

Yeah. So the CFD, which is contracts for difference, so the main support regime for offshore wind, but also for onshore wind and solar still exists, or exists again.

It's a support scheme that now allows for hybrid projects.

So some form of renewable generation plus storage, or even combinations of wind and solar. You could technically, I think, apply for a CFD.

Now, in this last round that happened early this year, I don't believe there were any hybrid project that participated as such. Cleave Hill, which is a sort of storage hybrid, did participate, but it put in a chunk of that solar capacity on a standalone basis. And basically, as long as you can keep track of the energy flows within your project, like what's coming out of your solar, farm and going into the battery, and then going into the grid, versus what might the battery take out of the grid and then put back in.

As long as you can split that out, it's fine. And the regulator that's said that's fine has published guidance on how to do that, because what they understandably want to avoid is paying subsidy on electricity that actually isn't renewable, and the battery is just sucked up from the grid and put back in.

Yeah, you can sort of double dip, can't you?

Yeah. But the UK is one of the markets where regulation does now allow that, and it's actually quite advanced. In other markets like Ireland, it's a lot more challenging still.

So hybrid projects in Ireland, the ones that we worked on that were one of the first solar storage hybrids, they're literally just, they're next to each other, but they have separate grid connections. Everything is separated.

They just share the site. So there's really not much benefit.

The use of system charges. Ouch.

Their own grid infrastructure. So there's really very little commercial benefit. You probably can operate them, maintain them, together. You might get a bit of a cost saving there. But yeah, it really shows you how much of a role regulation has to play in supporting and enabling these kind of hybrids. And annoyingly, regulation always lags behind the technology, really, and the innovation and the development side a little bit.

And where are these big power parks, energy parks, going to be? Yeah.

Are they going to be in the middle of nowhere? Are they going to be on the coast next to wind? Are they going to be--

yeah.

Teesside. Everything is in Teesside these days. It's like, just throw [INAUDIBLE]

place up in the air and Teesside will land face up for any sort of investment or industry right now.

HANNAH STAAB: Oh, yeah. Coastal communities are really seeing some benefit from this, which is great. So absolutely. Looking at the UK and looking at the amount of offshore winds that will be built out, and the government is very much betting on offshore wind to be the backbone of the Uk's electricity system.

There will absolutely be lots of times over the next few years where there's too much wind and we need to do something with it.

So it's logical that a lot of those storage, particularly green hydrogen infrastructure, will be located at the point where those offshore wind farms are coming online.

So my personal opinion is that probably we'll have the onshore--

that the hydrogen generation stuff will be located onshore rather than offshore with the turbines, although there are also some really cool concepts about having offshore hydrogen production with electrolysers located in the turbines or on a platform offshore.

We will see. I might be wrong about this, but I'm like, that seems more complicated.

Yeah.

Where to even--

yeah.

I'm going to shake my head, but not say anything out loud about it. I just don't understand.

Just servicing anything offshore is so expensive and complicated. I don't know why you'd put anything else offshore. Just put it on land.

That being said, again, coming back to the planning side and impact on communities, there's already a lot of challenges and pushback with all these grid connections coming onshore. That still has an impact. And things like putting even more industrial infrastructure there could be challenging.

But again, we have the ports. We have loads of refineries and industrial facilities that already use hydrogen, but they use the fossil fuel type of hydrogen, which is often called gray hydrogen or black hydrogen.

So for them, it's quite easy to switch over to using green hydrogen that's been made from wind power. So it makes sense that a lot of the industry would be concentrated on there.

But then down the line, like I said earlier, it's the remote areas that have difficulties with access to grid. So we might well see wind plus hydrogen somewhere in Wales or somewhere in Scotland where you might not have the hydrogen offtake directly there. But then you'll have to figure out a way to transport it.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Then you've got to move it.

Yeah.

I don't know. I just feel like there's a lot of problems that are being solved with hydrogen. Not your particular references there, but I think there's a lot of problems that are supposedly being solved with hydrogen. I think we should just skip that and go straight to electrification, personally.

But there's a supply chain issue with the issues with electrification, in supply chain, in planning, in infrastructure. I get it. I just feel like, come the year 2100, someone somewhere is going to be saying, all right. OK, maybe we should have just electrify and skip the hydrogen bit.

HANNAH STAAB: Yeah, and I completely agree with you. I'm very much in the school of, electrify what we can. That's going to be the cheapest and fastest and best way of doing it. And speed does matter here.

We're all under a net zero by 2050 going. But there are absolutely sectors that you can't electrify.

And the example I mentioned with existing refineries that use hydrogen for ammonia, like fertilizer production. It's a huge industry. It's actually loads of existing hydrogen demand. And that's all coming from natural gas. So if we can clean that up, that's a good start.

100%.

HANNAH STAAB: And electricity isn't going to do anything there. So yeah, it's about finding the right uses for it.

And there are some that are kind of in the middle whereas it's the whole heat pump versus hydrogen boiler debate. Yeah, and I personally fall more on the electrification side of that particular one.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: It's so funny speaking to some of our Scandinavian customers. And they can't believe there's even discussion. Firstly, they can't believe that we use gas for domestic heat, full stop. And secondly, there's even discussion about using hydrogen rather than putting heat pumps in.

But I want a heat pump. I don't have one. I really want a heat pump in my house. But one day, maybe Santa will bring one for me.

OK.

Can we talk for a second about--

because you are a proper wind expert, and we don't have that many wind people on the podcast.

Can you just talk briefly about what's going on in wind, particularly onshore, because offshore gets a lot of coverage, right? You've got the big CFD rounds. Oh, actually, onshore winds now have CFD, too. But the megaprojects are offshore. But what's going on onshore in the wind world?

Probably people are happier than they have been in the last few years onshore. Onshore was very much, in the UK, I think, the ugly stepchild, whatever you want to call it, where politically, there was a lot of opposition, support was withdrawn. It's very challenging for onshore wind developers.

And that probably benefited solar and storage, frankly, because a lot of people pivoted into developing that. But yeah, onshore wind is seeing a little bit of a Renaissance in the UK because there is that CFD support again, and also the price point, frankly, of onshore wind has reached a point now where you can definitely also do these projects on a subsidy-free basis through corporate PPA, utility PPAs.

And that's very standard now. And outside of the UK, you're seeing projects that are just as big as offshore wind farms, like gigawatt-scale onshore projects being developed in the Nordics that are providing a really substantial amount of their energy demand. And in the UK it's a bit more challenging, I think partly because of grid, and also because of the planning regulations, and particularly around tip height restrictions.

So with wind turbines, you want to get high up to access the higher wind speeds. The higher you are above the ground, the windier it is, as you know if you go on the roof of a building, you'll notice. So you want to build these things high.

I can see sideways rain hitting this window right now. So there's proof, audible proof.

There's a lot of wind out there. Yeah. So you want to build them tall. But obviously, the taller they are, you can see them from further round, and then from a planning perspective, it gets more challenging. It was actually getting to a point where the onshore wind sector, the turbine manufacturers, have moved on, and they're building bigger turbines now because most markets in the world are allowing these big turbines to be installed.

And it actually became a bit difficult in the UK to still source turbines that are stubby enough to fit within our permitted tip height envelope. Yeah, because it's legacy models in some cases that people have to use.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: So what's those numbers here? So what's a normal tip height? So that's like the maximum height. Is it of--

so you're looking at the top of the tower, and then the blade above that. That would be your tip height.

And so what's a normal number for onshore wind in the UK? And then how big do they go offshore? What's the difference?

We normally talk about turbines in the size of capacity of turbines, and that's very much correlated to the size of the blades. And therefore, the bigger the blades, the taller the tower has to be, so you don't hit the bottom. So offshore, people are easily building 12-megawatt turbines now.

I would say that the big boom in UK onshore wind, people were putting out two, three megawatt turbines. So way, way smaller.

And now the current generation of onshore turbines that's being built is probably runs of six megawatts. And that's what's going up in the Nordics where you can have these really tall tip heights. In the UK, I would say the goal for developers is to get to 220 meters. If you can get that, then that's pretty good, and then you can fit in a decent sized turbine. But it's not going to be possible on every site. And it is difficult because the planning process with wind takes long compared to batteries, or even compared to solar.

I'm really interested in that. So why does it take longer? And what's the time difference?

So battery you'd be able to consent easily within a year, right?

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Yeah.

With a wind farm, you have to find your site. You have to do lots of studies. A lot of time you have to do burden and mammoth surveys that lasts over the relevant season. So at least a year of just survey time.

And then often they go through an appeals process. It kind of goes back and forth. So you might end up with certainly two to four years, I would say. It can even be longer than that to get wind farm consented.

And because the technology is moving on, what developers have to do is put in a guess of what kind of turbines they're going to put on there based on where they think the market will be. And if it takes longer to consent the project, they might have a consented wind farm, but then they're like, oh no. It doesn't make sense to put those turbines in anymore.

I want to put in a bigger turbine. I have to go back and seek a variation to my consent, and redo a lot of my studies because I'm now dealing with taller turbines. So it can really be a long, drawn-out process. And to be honest, offshore is even longer.

But yeah, onshore is not free from those problems, and that can be--

It's pretty sad that the Nordics are installing gigawatt-size onshore wind, and we've got some lovely onshore wind areas. And we're just not doing it because I guess people don't want to look at them.

1 I should emphasize that there's been lots of surveys done that actually, public support for onshore wind is really strong. The majority of people want more onshore wind and like onshore wind, and say they would be happy to live near an onshore wind farm. However, there is quite a strong, organized anti-lobby.

And I also think--

none of us are above this. When something gets proposed in your back garden, you probably do think about it a little bit differently.

Yeah, that element of public opposition is one. But again, it's not all doom and gloom. We're working on a wind farm right now that is coming into construction that's 200 megawatts. That's a big project. And these wind farms have a capacity factor, which is like a measure of how much electricity they produce compared to their theoretical maximum of 40% onshore.

And that's because the UK wind resource is really good. It's not as good in the Nordics, which is also why they have to go higher in the Nordics. It's not as windy there.

Take that, Nordics.

HANNAH STAAB: So not all rosy over there.

Yeah.

So 200 megawatt wind farm, onshore wind farm, in the UK. So that will do on average 40% of that. So it will do on average 80 megawatts ish across 24 hours, or across a year.

That's how you think about it. Yeah.

OK, cool. Because we had Vasan talking about solar recently and capacity factors, because there's two numbers, right? Someone's got a gigawatt portfolio of renewables, but it only does x. And so it's important to understand the differences, or for me to understand, anyway.

Yeah, because the solar farm capacity factor is what, like, 10%, 12% in the UK?

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: So when you got a gigawatt solar portfolio, you do, but yeah. No disrespect to the solar people out there. All right. So I want to talk about batteries because that's what we love above all else, of course.

And you guys are doing quite a bit of work on energy storage across technical advisory, and now asset management, and monitoring, and some other data stuff, aren't you? So what's going on in the projects that you're seeing and working on?

I think what's been really cool in the UK in the last year or so is just the scale of individual projects has exploded.

And we're seeing lots of projects coming forward that are like 500 megawatts of storage in one spot, or even bigger than that. And then we're also seeing longer duration, so maybe two hours. So a gigawatt hour of storage in one spot.

And compared to this, what was currently on the system, typically your maximum 50 megawatts of storage, that's a huge difference.

It's still big, guys!

HANNAH STAAB: It's still big. Not denying that. But again, when we come and say, as a planning consultant, helping our clients get consent for these projects, that does make a difference, because it turns from a couple of shipping containers to actually, this is now quite a big area with lots of containers, or lots of enclosures, or some sort of warehouse solution.

And whereas in the past, it was very much like, oh, yeah. Storage will get consented. Nobody could possibly object to this. Once you talk about these bigger schemes, you probably do have to do a bit more work as a developer to demonstrate and analyze the impacts and make sure that it's all as it should be.

So the scale thing has been really cool, I think, and also technically really interesting because you do see people proposing concepts like warehouse systems that are sitting inside a building or double-stacked storage, which as engineers, and we look at that, and we're like mm. It's maybe not the best.

Please do tell.

HANNAH STAAB: Well, fire safety is really important. And I think it's only taken one major incident of a fire on a UK battery project for planning authorities and the public to get way more concerned about this. And frankly, I think our industry in the UK wasn't taking it seriously enough and wasn't really knowledgeable enough about this stuff.

And as people are developing these bigger schemes, they're having to deal with this. They're having to grapple with their insurance people putting in pretty strict requirements and asking lots of uncomfortable questions.

So that's been fun, even though it's a really serious topic, but it's been fun just engaging with developers. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think the US market is definitely leading the way on this, and that's where a lot of the standards and the best practice guidelines on fire safety are coming from. So we at Natural Power really benefited from having a US business that's been doing storage for just as long as we have and have seen all of this, and yeah, probably have a bit more lessons learnt and a bit more, here's genuinely what makes a difference and what matters that we can bring to the UK market.

Yeah.

I remember when EDF built the EFT battery they got, the one that they got.

What was it called? It's next to the power station. Alex is going to kill me for forgetting this. And it's got massive blast walls between them. And when they built that and we saw photos back when I was at Centrica, I was like, oh, these guys are doing it properly.

Centrica also built a beautiful battery in a building with a completely overengineered fire and safety stuff because they wanted to be completely sure it was going to be--

they could manage that risk. And then everybody else was just putting containers in fields.

And shoving them right next to each other and hoping for the best, and really not thinking at all about the risk of fire propagation. And also, the risk of first responders having to deal with this. That's the thing I think--

I think air separation, isn't this--

you'll be closer to the technical detail. But I think the school of thought at the moment is, blast walls aren't necessary, and suitable air separation is enough for container systems.

HANNAH STAAB: Yeah. You don't need blast walls if you leave enough space and if you think about your venting. So you want to vent upwards, ideally.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Not sideways.

And all that access to the container. So we were moving away from a system where it's like a shipping container where someone has to open the door and walk inside to get to anything, but being able to access the batteries from the outside is way safer.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Yeah, absolutely. And so what else are you guys working on? And what are you seeing as trends? So bigger systems.

We talked about half gigawatt hour batteries, which just blows my mind.

I can't wait to--

I want to go. I want to go and walk around one of those sites when they build it.

It's going to look very boring.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Oh.

Yeah it will, won't it? I'm still going to get excited about it. And what other trends or things are you seeing out there in the battery space?

Well, I think you guys are the experts of all the big revenue stack. And a lot of the time we're talking to developers and investors and asset owners who've come from the renewables world who are used to, well, I'm just selling my electricity, and I get money for it. And they really struggle with the complex and slightly unpredictable and ever-changing revenue stack that is battery storage.

So while every year we see a few more clients of ours make that leap and be like, OK, we feel like we get it now. We can invest in this. We've convinced our board. We've convinced our shareholders to invest in storage. It's always, you still have to have that conversation.

Yeah it's mad.

I want to do the digging back now at the wind and solar industry. But wind and solar has been so used to availability. The way you operate effectively is making things available. And available just doesn't cut it in the battery world.

You can be available, but it's the first real power system's asset class where the way that you operate is the difference between losing money and making money, which I just think is so exciting, and is part of a bigger trend of, all assets now are an optimization problem. DNOs now are seeing their assets as an optimization problem, not a build more copper, but how do I use these things better?

Everything is becoming an optimization problem in a world of limited resources. You've really got me going on about this stuff now.

But you're right. That's exactly what's happening. And even the developers, who are not looking at developing batteries, who are just doing solar and wind, they have to deal with this because they know that in the future much and word, it's not enough to just be like, well, I'm going to dump my megawatt hours onto the grid whenever it's sunny or whenever it's windy.

You will have to manage that much and risk, because we will be in a world--

and we're already starting to see these periods--

where if it's very windy in the UK, our wholesale prices drop and even go negative. So if you're someone who's exposed to that wholesale price and you're just dumping your power onto the grid, that's not a way to operate a wind farm.

You will have to manage that risk. And co-locating--

bringing it back to the hybrid point--

co-locating with some form of storage is a really good way of managing that.

Yeah. You're leaving a ton of money on the table.

How about asset management? What's happening there? Because I know Natural Power won some contracts recently. I don't know if you're allowed to talk about it. But you've won some contracts to do asset management on behalf of asset owners to look after those batteries and make sure that they are running efficiently and effectively.

And I guess until recently, that wasn't really a problem, right?

In wind, you have to do a lot of operations and maintenance for batteries. You didn't have to do much and now suddenly--

I say suddenly, gradually--

not suddenly. The opposite of suddenly. The industry is realizing that these things need to be looked after. And some of the big asset owners, the big funds, have done this for a long, long time.

But a lot of the newer players--

I think it's a surprise, or it can be a bit of a surprise.

Did I say that diplomatically enough? I don't really think I did. Please, I didn't mean to offend anyone. But essentially, asset management is important. Why?

HANNAH STAAB: Oh.

It did sound a bit aggressive there.

I guess taking it back to maybe some of the differences between conventional and renewable generation and storage, where you're right.

A wind farm, solar farm, you have to send people out there in a van to maintain them to fix stuff, to swap out parts. You do have to do that with batteries as well, but it's less of a day to day activity.

The other thing is with wind and solar, you normally get a really lovely, fully wrapped operations maintenance contract, where some party will do absolutely everything for you. They'll manage the warranty for you. They will do all the maintenance, the scheduled maintenance, and responding to faults. They will monitor the system around the clock. They will write your reports.

It's all kind of packaged. It would give you the performance and availability warranties. It's all in one piece. Whereas with batteries, I think there's maybe less standardization just yet, and we see more that your OEMs are taking on some of that, but then there might also be another party that does the more low tech maintenance. There might be another party doing the HB side of it.

So you have more contractors and more interfaces to manage, which is where an asset manager should be able to add a lot of value. So I think there's that the day to day, how does the whole contract suite look like in the project? And how is that managed?

And then it's like you said. It's the data and performance side of it. So what is the battery doing? Is your optimizer doing a good job?

And that's where companies like Modo help because they allow you to see what your asset is doing compared to other assets. That's a huge thing, actually, that we don't have in the wind and solar world, necessarily, is being able to see publicly how your asset is performing compared to others, because there isn't that same public--

Watch this space.

HANNAH STAAB: Oh, you've got plans. But yeah, that's always been a real bugbear, I guess, for the industry, that people are very private with their data. Of course they are. So getting that benchmark is hard, whereas in storage, it is not easy, but it's possible.

I was just waiting for that one.

I think we've run out of time. What else?

Do you want to plug anything? Is there anything you're working on that everyone should know about?

This is the chance to get your message out there. So is there anything else you want to add? Also, no is an acceptable answer.

Oh, no. I do want to obviously plug stuff.

And we've talked about hybrids. I genuinely am weirdly passionate about hybrid projects. I think it makes so much sense. And I'm really excited by how much the industry is really starting to seriously grapple with that, and really thinking about what's the best for their projects in a way, what's best for their children.

How can we find the right combinations of stuff? And I think that's something we at Natural Power have a lot of experience in--

helping people figure out how much of the different technologies do you put together? How is it going to work practically, but also from a revenue and optimization side? So if anyone who's listening is getting their head around that at the moment, please do get in touch.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Well, we'll put a link in the show notes.

And that's it. I want to say, Hannah, that was a great conversation. And thanks for pulling me up on all the things, all the nonsense, that I talk about.

I want to say to anyone who's listening, please do hit subscribe. It really does mean the world to us. And let us know what you think in the comments. Until next time, thanks very much.

Thank you.

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