23 - What Asset Success looks like for energy storage (Quentin Draper-Scrimshire, CEO @ Modo Energy)

Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Modo Podcast. My name is Robin. I'm in a bit of a changeup from normal.

I am joined by Quentin, our CEO and co-founder, and we're going to have a little chat about where Modo's been, where's it going, who Quentin is, yeah, have a little conversation in light of our really big announcement a few weeks ago, which is really exciting that we managed to raise some money, and then what's looking ahead on the Modo timeline. So Quentin, before we go any further, who are you? Well, first, I just want to say thank you for inviting me on such a highly esteemed podcast. It really is--

ROBIN: It's my pleasure.

--a privilege to be sat here talking to you. So yeah, who am I? I'm Quentin. I'm CEO co-founder of Modo Energy.

Yeah, I've been doing energy stuff for eight years, nine years, and what else about me? I ride a Brompton bicycle. Most places.

ROBIN: Very hipster. What color? It is blue and black. It's called electric blue, but it's not electric.

I'm a father to one daughter, and I've got a dog, who's in the office right now and probably is going to scratch at the glass in a second. I do love Ted. We do love Ted.

--best dog. So what kind of--

are you an engineer, or did you do art? I am an engineer. So yeah, I did a few arty things, actually, but I'm not an artist. So I'm an engineer, electrical engineer originally.

Did that at University of Manchester. I was very lucky in that I spent five years at Manchester because I--

Living the dream of the student life in Manchester, the city of the student, for five years. Yes. Yeah, nice. Big on the music scene?

Yeah, in my 20s--

well, actually, my teens and my 20s were highly geared around electronic music. So being in Manchester was very, very distracting. I did five years of Manchester, did my masters, worked in nuclear for a bit.

ROBIN: Cool. It was a bit too slow for me then worked at Centrica. There's a few--

if I describe my career so far, which really isn't that long in the grand scheme of things, became an engineer. Did engineering stuff at Centrica. So I worked in offshore wind, offshore gas in the Irish sea and the North Sea, then thermal power stations, Langage and South Humber Bank and petrol power station, some other ones, and then got into batteries. So then I started my battery bit in 2014, 2015.

Really early on the battery timeline.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: Yeah, I'm a battery dinosaur. Of course, that's a ridiculous thing to say. I guess having all of those different experiences within on the Centrica grad scheme and all those different bits of energy gives you kind of a really nice view to come into batteries and see what can they give the system. Yeah, it was incredible.

So I mean just, shout out to the Centrica grad scheme, which was you did a year in different places, got to go all around the world, got to go in helicopters, boats. It was like a--

ROBIN: Very James Bond. Very James Bond--

exactly. Very James Bond lifestyle. No, it wasn't. I had to live in Grimsby for a year.

That was interesting.

ROBIN: Not very James Bond. Not very James Bond. I actually love Grimsby in general. I had a lot of fun there.

So it was very varied. And then I went to work at Kiwi Power. And yeah, that was--

so I went to work at Kiwi on battery stuff. It was inter-commercial. So I left engineering a little bit. Built some batteries, controlled some batteries, did optimization for a few years.

And so I became head of energy storage for Kiwi in the UK and Europe. And Kiwi Power at the time, there was like--

I know you're from Open Energy. So you're going to kick off about this. But it was like, people controlling batteries. It was Limejump, Kiwi, and other, right?

And I think I can say that without people--

without being too--

I would disagree with that entirely.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: Well, yeah, OK, and Open Energy and other, right? And so I'll aggregate here. So--

and at the time, Kiwi was on a tear, and we were venture-backed, and we were just--

it was like growth--

It was like a massive cash for volume. And like, no one was making any money. All of these companies were hugely loss making, but it was trying to get as much volume as possible to make these businesses scale. Yeah, absolutely.

So it's like, can you get to a gigawatt? Can you go a bit beyond that? Anyway, I left Kiwi in 2019 and started Modo. And yeah, the aggregators have sort of gone a different way.

So most of them have been bought, and they're now doing battery optimisation or focused on other things. And it's really interesting to see that happen. Anyway, started Modo in 2019 with Tim, who's not on the podcast at the moment. But he is somewhere in the office.

And Tim and I--

yeah, so Tim's a co-founder. So where did you meet Tim? We met at school. We met at school.

So we met in year seven. He was one of my first friends. And he was in my class. So you've known him for longer than you haven't known him.

I have known him for an awfully long time. And unfortunately for him, he's known me for a very long time. And I--

ROBIN: And did you always think you'd start a business together? I think no, it's safe to say. So school, there were three of us who went on to do engineering.

ROBIN: Mm-hmm. And there was me and Tim and another guy who ended up--

I think he's like a fighter pilot now or something very cool.

ROBIN: Nice. But Tim and I both did engineering, went our separate ways. We ended up in the power sector. I ended up in a power sector, and then we'd meet up at Christmas and summer and talk about what we're going to do.

Have those really, really interesting energy conversations.

--else leaves the room for. Yeah, exactly. So me and him are sat in the side of the room drinking some obscure wine talking about energy nonsense. And we had a few ideas for businesses, most of which were rubbish.

ROBIN: Mm-hmm. And then by the time 2019 came around, we're like, OK, we're going to do this thing. Let's have a go. OK.

So what was Modo supposed to be when it started?

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: Not this. Not this? Whatever this is. So yeah, it's been a journey. So originally, the company Modo Energy was started to--

what do we want to do? We wanted to build an optimizer a bit like what Habitat did, and I guess again, shout out to Habitat because they--

ROBIN: They did, very very well. Massive. So fast. Right? They were like, batteries are the future.

The aggregator model is too sort of dispersed, if you like, trying to do DSR and batteries and--

Yeah, trying to do everything. Really lacked the focus and the strategy. Whereas Habitat nailed the marketing piece. They had some really great founders and really targeted front of the meter storage, artificial intelligence, machine learning, all of those really great buzzwords, and have done really well.

They have done very well. And I think they're one of those companies that we owe quite a lot to because they got--

they did a big job in getting investors comfortable. Anyway, enough about habitat. So we were going to--

this is about Modo, right? We were going to start a company that was going to be optimization of batteries. The idea was to automate--

my belief and Tim's belief was that batteries were going to play this massive role in the BM. And the BM was going to be most of battery revenues. And if you could write BM control software and sell it to asset owners like Gresham House or Zenobe or Harmony, those kinds of--

I should probably look a little bit more in the Arenko side of things to start off. Yeah, exactly. And then what actually happened was we spent 3/4 of the cash. The software we couldn't sell because our balance sheet wasn't big enough.

There was loads of capital coming into other optimizers. And we decided we didn't want to be in that market. Yeah, I mean, it's very crowded.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: It was very crowded. And more so now, really. was some companies doing a really good job.

ROBIN: Yeah. And we just knew we only had a couple of 100,000 pounds. I know that's a lot of--

that still is a lot of money, right? A couple 100,000 pounds to get a business off the ground. Yeah, but compared to someone like Shell coming along and buying Limejump--

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: Yeah, you're talking millions versus--

Yeah.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: And so, yeah, we figured that wasn't the right journey for us. We'd already built quite a lot of software and benchmarking.

--what point did you manage to get to that pivot? So yeah, it was Christmas. It was like--

Alex, if anyone knows Alex from Modo, or--

yeah, so there was me, Alex, Tim, and a guy called Will, who's left and gone to do other things. And we knew the writing was on the wall. We didn't have much money left. And yeah, we had to do something very drastic.

And so we went to the pub, had a chat about it. There was a lot of soul searching. It was bloody awful. But actually, we said we've got this benchmarking thing.

Can we do something with that? And we showed a few customers, and it just sort of happened.

ROBIN: Yeah. But it wasn't--

we didn't expect it to go like this. We were just completely desperate. I've got to be honest, right? The founder story is like, you look back, and like, oh, everyone was so great.

You made so many great decisions. But like, the founder story is just horrible. It's just like treacle, just going through this thing, trying to--

right, this sounds really negative, doesn't it? Oh, let's shine a light on how great it all is. No, but you made this great decision to pivot. Other people would have just kind of kept going and not been able to kind of change direction.

But the great thing about being in a really small team in a start up is you can kind of take the learnings that you've had and divert things and do something more sensible and use what you've got in the best way.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: Well, it was als--

Which I guess was beginning with the leaderboard.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: Yeah, exactly. So we had--

And that first benchmarking thing became the leaderboard.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: Yeah, we had this leaderboard thing. And we--

so it sounds like courage. I would say it sounds like courage, but it was mostly luck. And yeah, we had to throw most of what we'd done in the bin, which was a difficult thing to do. But what we had built is some software that ran on Amazon Web Services that looked at batteries and saw what they were doing.

And that was quite useful because you could use that data and see who was doing better than each other or whatever. And so we started off with this leaderboard thing that we used to send people via email. I seem to remember getting a PDF report back in the day.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: There was a PDF report, right? You didn't pay--

see, this is the thing, right? So we had this--

no, we did Not pay for it.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: So we started doing the battery leaderboard on a PDF. It's like a four page A4 piece of paper with a little letter on the front from me and Tim saying, thanks for buying this report. And we knew this thing was getting--

this report was getting forwarded because we had people calling us up saying, oh, I've seen your report. You're the Modo guys. It's called, you know, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, guys, you know,

ROBIN: I mean--

--you didn't buy that report.

ROBIN: --great free marketing. Yes, exactly, so--

And getting it out there in your name known. Speaking of the name, while I think of it, where did Modo come from?

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: So which answer do you want? I want the honest answer.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: All right, so this is a pretty nerdy answer. So the truthful answer is I'm a big fan of the Discworld novels, which is Terry Pratchett. Rest in peace. Absolutely.

ROBIN: I think I had many Terry Pratchett quotes in my thesis. Well, there you go, right? So--

and then so there's the wizards in Discworld. There's a university called The Unseen University. And--

it's getting niche, right? And at that university, there is a gardener.

ROBIN: A garden--

yep. And it's the gardener who's called Modo, who is like--

I can't remember the quote. He's like really into manure or something. Anyway, it's just a funny, like, satirical character. And we wanted something that was a bit catchy.

And so we went with that.

ROBIN: Nice. And I guess part of the Modo name is, I think, the really strong branding of the company. Did you get, like, a design agency in to start with, or was it kind of done in house? Yeah, we did--

so we got lots of help. We got lots of help from some really helpful, smart people along the way. Yeah, so Tim and I don't have a design background, and Will and Alex, who started with us, didn't either. We brought in an agency.

The agency--

we were quite pleased with how it went. Since then, we've built design skills in-house. We designed the platform that you can use. We did designs of that in-house, the user experience design, the user interface design.

But at the time, we didn't have a clue. So yeah, I'm very, very thankful to the people that helped us. And I guess it is kind of harking back to what Modo is at its core in that we take a lot of lessons from the software as a service companies coming out of San Francisco.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: Absolutely, yeah. And so would you call energy--

and maybe this is a slightly leading question. But would you call Modo an energy company or a tech company? So yeah, so we are a software as a service business. And that is not just in name.

So everything about how we run the company, so everything from the fact that we've got a free product, the fact that we're basically building a media company on the side, the way that we solve problems, our approaches to--

how the subscription works and how we can ship ideas to customers faster. That is all inspired by--

it's like a movement in Silicon Valley at the moment. And it sounds very silly for me to say, right? But it is a movement in business, which is all of the operational--

all the ways to run a business, turn it on its head. Make it about subscriptions and digitize it. And there are so many benefits to that. Yeah.

And I guess one of the main benefits of the subscription model, which I've learned since I've come into Modo, is really, it's about how much you're valued at and the share price of the company. So that's part of it, right? So--

Well, that means you're able to develop the product more. If you'll get a strong valuation because you've got a really good [INAUDIBLE]. Exactly, yeah. So I would say it the other way around, right?

So like, raising money and the valuation, all that kind of stuff is great. And there is a reason why businesses that have recurring revenue are valued higher than normal operational businesses because you have some commitment from customers that they're with you for the long term.

ROBIN: It's less risk, right? But really, the magic of software as a service is really two things--

what you can do with the technology. So you can get closer to your customers. You can understand their problems better, and you can learn from how they're using your product. So we measure everything.

Every time someone goes on Modo, we are measuring how they're using a platform and learning and testing new features and new things, right? You can only really do that with software. But the second most important one is if you know that your revenues are reliable in the future, you can take bigger bets than you would usually. So we take big risks.

We see risk as an opportunity. And we take big risks in the company that are outsized for our size as a business.

ROBIN: Yeah. Which means we can deliver stuff for our customers faster, better. We ask what's the biggest thing we can do here. How can we disrupt?

And that's really kind of harking back to those San Francisco companies. So given that, what do you think some of the biggest failures that Modo has done? Because that, in itself, is a huge risk, right? We could spend a load of money, a load of time, a load of resource developing something which, at the end of the day, we think is a bit rubbish and actually needs to go in the bin, and we should do something else.

Which we do, which we do. So what do you--

I'm very proud that we make those kind of things.

--the biggest failure that we've done at Modo? Loads. So we--

I can't--

so firstly, I think we're making failures. That's good. That means we're doing stuff, and it means that we're taking risk. But we are going to get some things wrong.

Wow, where to even start here? So we built features that didn't land, right? Things like notifications. We didn't build it right it.

We didn't really understand what the customer problem was, and we canned that. We spent a lot of engineering time building notifications that we didn't use. I think on a bigger note, I think when we started the company--

yeah, I mean, look. We started an optimizer and threw it in the bin. So what more do you want from that? Yeah, fair.

Fair. I think we've learned from a lot of mistakes. And I think Tim and I have also learnt about going from a tiny startup to a slightly bigger startup--

Yeah.

--and all the things around how we have to overcommunicate how we want the business to be run. And yeah, it's very--

woe is me, the founder, right? But it's an unusual journey as a founder to grow this fast, and it means that our leadership style is constantly old. And our leadership style needs to be six months ahead of where it actually is.

ROBIN: Yeah. You know what I mean? I guess speaking of scaling things up, so Modo in the last, I don't know, 12 months, maybe, how much have we grown? Yeah, so we--

oh, might as well get some numbers, right? So we were growing in--

ROBIN: OK, how many are we at the moment? In people or sales?

ROBIN: In people. In people. So there's about 25 people working on the project, if you like, most of which full time. So most of those are based in the UK.

And then we have a technical team based out of the Ukraine.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: Yeah. Well, now--

were based out--

Or were based in the UK. Some of them are now not.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: --are mostly spread across Europe. Yep. For obvious reasons. So that's the number of people.

So where do you think we'll be in, say, 12 months time in terms of people? Are we looking to, say--

So--

--team? So by the end of this year, we would have doubled the team in six months, right, which is fast enough, I think. That's enough to keep you up at night because we've got to work really hard at culture and hiring, right? You've got hiring--

well, we talked about this so much, Robin, but hiring is a really tricky thing to do, and you can't rush it. It's very difficult. But we also care for--

a lot of people doesn't necessarily mean success. And so we'd rather hire less people and give them higher compensation, right, and get them to work. Get them to be creative and do better things than have lots more people. So headcount is not a metric that we're going to aim for, but it's going to be higher than it is now.

Yeah, so on that note, what do you think is going to drive that growth? Not necessarily in terms of headcount, but how are we going to grow the Modo product to better benefit batteries? I guess we haven't really spoken that much about why we think batteries are so great, but what is the future for Modo in supporting the huge growth in batteries that we've been seeing? Yes, so it's big.

So I'm going to say Qism now, which is on a high level, right? But if you take a step back, it's our belief--

our belief is that when disruptive technology comes along, generally, most of the population underestimate how transformative it will be. And that happened with mobile phones. It's happened with a bazillion different things you can imagine, right? Uber, blah, blah, blah, blah.

ROBIN: Mm-hm. So I believe that batteries is one of these things. So if you go on LinkedIn, there's still an army of people who are like, batteries are useless. Blah, blah, blah.

They're too expensive. What's the real carbon cost, blah, blah? And that's because we're right at the start of the S-curve of adoption. So it's our belief that batteries are going to be transformative in a way that we perhaps even can't imagine.

But what we do know is we think we're going to have 50, 100 gigawatts of batteries in the UK by 2050, right? If you're going to--

50, 100 gigawatts by 2050.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: Damn right, yeah. So if going to electrify--

For reference we, currently have 1 and 1/2 gigs. So in the next 30 years, you're saying we're going to 10 times the amount of--

At least. Because everything is being electrified, right? And a lot of these assets are going to be one, two, three, four hour systems. And you need a lot more megawatt hours of storage.

And the cost curve of lithium ion is coming down so fast or just batteries in general. So if everything's going be electrified and your peak demand is going to double--

at least, right? Let alone all these flying Ubers and stuff that we hope is going to happen. Yeah, we need tons more storage. I guess it's if we can harness it all.

How cool would it be if we could harness all those EVs or flying Ubers?

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: Yes. The storage in those, that could be really transformative. And then--

so you ask about where does Modo fit in. So our belief is as a company--

well, in the 1980s, some--

last century. So the 20--

well, let's get this one. The 20th century, right?

ROBIN: Yes. Was all about--

the end of it was all about digitization of financial markets. Everything became a financial asset, right? And Wall Street became digital and blah, blah, blah. And we had all these companies like Bloomberg or Reuters who made a big impact of providing information to make that whole thing work.

And so it's mine and Tim's belief that the 21st century is all about energy, right? Well, it certainly has been so far. Well, it needs to be, right? Yeah, it needs to be.

Otherwise, we're going to boil the oceans or whatever. That's a very inflammatory thing to say, but you know what I mean. So everything's about energy, but it hasn't yet been digitized. And we see information and data is a big part of that.

And the same way that Bloomberg in the 1980s started and transformed that industry, Modo is going to do the same for the energy industry. So we're focused on battery stuff at the moment. We're focused on Great Britain, Western Europe. But long term, this is going to be a complete offering of--

At some point, we will be less niche, and we will move outside the battery space.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: Yes, that's right. That's right. But it's not going to happen for the next few years.

ROBIN: Yeah, I guess the real strength of being so focused on batteries at the moment is it is super niche, super young. Change is constantly the market, and having that level of insight that we're able to get is really what people pay for. Yeah, exactly. The market's moving so fast.

It's a really interesting asset class. It's growing fast. It's like the fastest growing power systems asset class in the world. And it's really, really complicated.

ROBIN: Yes. So for people--

I mean, a lot of us at Modo have got very short attention spans. This suits us. It does, I guess. Yeah, the whole battery space suits people with short attension spans--

--because nothing stays longer than three months. But when we said we were going to do this, right, so I'm not going to do, like, calling out the haters or whatever if they do. But when we said we were going to focus on asset owner and operators in Great Britain of batteries, we got told by some of the smartest people we know that is too small a market. Why are you going to build software for those guys?

This thing is never going to work. And so we thought--

well, we disagreed, and we did it anyway. And that was very difficult to do because when you got so many clever people--

--early kind of fundraising conversations I'm guessing were sort of--

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: Oh I mean, yeah. Early fundraising was, yeah, very humbling. Very, very humbling. So you have this--

I don't want to talk about fundraising too much because fundraising is not why you do a business, right? But a lot of my job has been and will be it. You basically you have--

you have to go and pitch your business. You pitch your idea. And the earlier you are, the more risk there is. And you have to go to more and more people.

And you come across the smartest intellectual, eloquent people. And Tim and I had never done this before, you know? And they just say, no, it's rubbish. The market is too small.

You product's not going to work. It's too early, you know? No one's going to buy this thing. And that is such an assault on the personal confidence.

ROBIN: On the ego. It's a good thing to do.

ROBIN: Humbling. Very humbling. I would recommend it to everyone.

ROBIN: Yeah. Go on "Dragon's Den" as part of your work experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what's next for Modo?

We've got benchmarking down. We've got a really nice platform. We've just released a bunch of new features which will really help asset owners and operators look at sort of daily operational, what things are doing on, say, the heat wave last week, but able to kind of really drill down into the detail of those. What else is coming up?

Yeah, so I guess we've done a lot of work on the company strategy in the last few months. And we see--

we've identified a new problem. So I guess for the last couple of years, we've been known as the leaderboard company. Blah, blah, blah. And now we're going a bit bigger.

So a lot of our customers are asset owners or utilities or asset optimizers. And what we understand about how they're using information and data is they're looking at a few things. They want asset performance. They want asset reporting.

They want to obviously operate those assets. And when you bring all that together, what they really want is their assets to be successful, right? They want information and data. And then they want to use that information and data to figure out what to do next.

And they want their assets to be successful. And that is a really--

asset success is a really important part of net zero because we need energy storage to be successful as an asset class so we can get more investment in it so we can build more renewables so we can get to net zero, right? So this is all a noble thing to do. And so when you think about asset success, now what's involved in that? It's providing data.

It is research and what you do with that data. It's benchmarking the performance of assets such as using the leaderboard or other features that we've got now. And then the last bit that we haven't touched on yet is forecasting. So data, research, benchmarking, and forecasting--

that's all this asset success thing. And so until very recently, we--

well, as you know, Robin, because you and your team have been working on it. This is the big pullback and reveal, right? Basically, we've been working for a long time on building a forecast, a forecast for batteries in Great Britain, how much money they're going to make in the future. And this week, we're going to release it.

Woo hoo! Woo hoo! And it's called Modo Signal, and everyone should check it out. And essentially, the point behind it is we've done loads--

two years, basically, working on this--

of customer discovery, so asking questions from our customers. How do they use Modo? What are the data sources they have? How are they forecasting what their assets are going to do?

And we've just heard over and over again two things. Number one, the market has got--

there are forecasting services in the market that will tell you what the power price will be in 2050. And they are fantastic at doing that. But that's like--

but if you want to know what's happening next year or the year after, it's the wrong tooling to use. It's like looking through a telescope to see what's right in front of you, right? And what people want to know is how much are batteries going to make next year or the year after. They want to know the real far and future stuff too, right?

And that's important.

ROBIN: Yeah, really important for that, long term mass evaluations or getting stuff built. But there is this significant gap with now and the very near future. Yeah, and you have to take a completely different approach to modeling it. So we saw this thing.

We saw of opportunity and thought, oh, we've heard this probably from like 20 different customers now. We should have a go at this, and that was a long time ago. We've been working on it in the background. And the second thing we heard from customers is that when they look at forward-looking curves, they struggle to fit those curves into a battery business case because they're not built for batteries, right?

They're curves that are about the power price across the whole market, not what is a battery going to do in--

ROBIN: Yeah, because by and large, they're being used to--

it's value solar assets or wind losses. And they are looking at the average power price during the middle of the day or the average--

you know. We're looking at baseload and peak prices for those assets whereas that's really not relevant for battery storage.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: Exactly, yes. The way that--

as you know, Robin. It's preaching to the converted. But what matters to batteries is spreads. You also need to layer in ancillary services properly with a proper dispatch model.

It's a lot more complicated for storage because it's not generation, right? We're fitting it into--

policy says it's generation and regulatory says it's generation, but it ain't. And so those two things, people wanted to know what's going to happen in the next two or three years, and they didn't want to use a telescope to see the end of their fingers. But also, they wanted something that worked for batteries. And so that's what we've built, this thing called Modo Signal.

We launch it in August, this week or next week, whenever it's coming out, whenever it gets finished. And we're really, really excited about it.

ROBIN: Yeah, it's going to be transformational, I think. It's really exciting--

--to be able to use some real, like, data science methods on some quite challenging data sets. There's not much data about ancillary services. So a lot of the kind of run of the mill churn models you might use in, say, telecoms or financial marketing don't work. So yeah, we've had to really kind of go back to basics, go to the fundamentals of spreads, and how batteries make money, looking at that volatility, trying to model statistical distributions to really get the kind of freak price events, which is where batteries make most of their money in some regards.

So yeah, it's been really cool. I think hopefully, it will be well-received in the market. Well, we'll see. We'll see.

All right, enough about Modo. Let's move on to what really excites you about the kind of future energy system. I guess we've been talking a lot about batteries, but where do you see 2050? What's going to be happening?

I think it's going to--

so I always ask everyone else this question. It's quite difficult to be asked it myself. I think the 2020s are going to be really difficult. I think the economic environment for this decade is going to be challenging because if interest rates keep on going up and the impact of that and the impact of quantitative easing for the last 10 years and all that kind of stuff--

I'm not going to say the doom and gloom. But I think the 2020s are going to be tricky. But I think the technology will still keep pace, and then things will really start to happen in the 2030s when we get back to a normal--

I say "normal," right, like this--

economic environment and the cost curves in the technology have really improved for these assets. We should by then have huge amounts of wind on the system

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: We should. Yeah, yeah. Like, zero marginal price power.

QUENTIN DRAPER-SCRIMSHIRE: I mean, I'm pretty--

yeah, so there's a few things. I'm pretty positive in general, I think, about the net zero thing. I think there's a lot of great work being done. I'm unsure about how many gaps are being filled with this hydrogen thing.

I think hydrogen is going to be transformation in loads of areas of the economy and energy. I'm concerned about how much of policy and how much of government is thinking about this thing that's going to solve all our problems. I think we need to be honest with ourselves and say we need other solutions in some cases.

ROBIN: Yeah. But I'm pretty buzzing about us hitting net zero. We are making massive progress. If it wasn't for the Russia crisis, we would have made a big, big dent on coal generation across the world, apart from--

we won't mention China. But they too are building up renewables faster than ever. So yeah, I'm pretty excited about it. I'm not so doom--

I'm a bit doom and gloom on the economy for the next few years, but I'm not very doom and gloom on--

I think we're going to get there as a society.

ROBIN: Awesome. Well, on that very positive note, I think we'll wrap up. So thank you very much for taking the time to chat through to me. Yes, thank you for having me, of course.

It's my pleasure. And catch us at "Modo on the Roof" this Thursday. Yeah, when's this going out? Is this going out--

Oh, today.

--yeah, it's out Thursday. So we will see you--

Later on. We'll see you later. And there are going to be Modo cocktails. What are they called again?

Modo Monsoons. I believe they're purple. They're purple. So we'll see you there. See you there.

Have a good day.