35 - Looking at longer-duration storage with John Perkins (Principal Consultant @ Afry)

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Modo Podcast. I'm Ed Porter, guest host.

And today, I'm joined by John Perkins from AFRY. John, welcome.

Hi. Afternoon.

Would you like to take a moment to introduce yourself and AFRY to our listeners?

Yeah, of course.

Thanks very much for having me.

It's great to be on.

So I'm, as you said, from AFRY Management Consulting. We're a consultancy in the energy industry.

There's a few hundred of us in the UK and around the world, AFRY, as well as the consulting, big engineering firm. So big, big international company. But I'm from the consultancy bit, very focused on the energy market in this country, and have been there for a little while now, 12 years or so. So part of the furniture.

Part of the furniture. Well, it's great to have you on. It's great to have you on. You're like an industry celeb.

I don't know about that.

So I'm going to start off with a quick-fire round, just a couple of easy questions to get started. So first one--

"ay-free" or "af-free"?

Yeah, good question. "Ay-free."

ED PORTER: "Ay-free."

I thought we might have got rid of this when we were Poyry or "Puru," now AFRY.

AFRY. OK, great. Nodal or zonal?

Oh, zonal. Zonal. OK, good, good, good.

JOHN PERKINS: Come back to that later.

Yeah, come back to that later. REMA or EMR?

Oh, goodness. REMA, whatever that means.

Yeah, whatever that means. E-bike or pedal power?

Pedal power.

ED PORTER: Pedal power, good.

In Oxford, definitely pedal power.

In Oxford, definitely pedal power. What a place. And then if you had a choice of adding 10 gigawatts of solar or 10 gigawatts of wind to the UK network, what would you choose?

Wind.

Wind. OK, good. Good. Right. Well, we're through those. I think I'd give you 100% on those answers.

So congratulations. So let's get straight into the core part here, which is that AFRY did a piece of work for [? Bayes ?]

around longer-duration storage that started last year. Is that right?

That's right, yep.

Took a little while to work its way through into the public domain. But yeah, really interesting piece to work on, looking at the needs for long-duration storage in a net-zero future, looking at how much storage we might need, what kinds of storage, what durations, what locations. So yeah, really broad piece of work covering a lot of different bases and a very interesting one to work on.

Yeah, OK.

Totally agreed. Totally agreed. And if I could just do a little bit of scene setting, so I think we had some--

so I was flicking through the report. And it was something like the renewable generation in terms of onshore, offshore wind, plus solar is going from 50 gigs to 300 gigawatts by 2050, alongside demand, I think, was growing from something around 300 terawatt hours, which is where the UK is today, with all the electrification, et cetera, going to 800 terawatt hours.

So we're seeing massive growth in intermittent generation alongside lots of additional demand coming into the system.

We need something to balance that. In comes storage of all kinds. So how did you see that market developing?

Yes. I mean, I guess the good thing about it is we need a lot of everything. So there's a lot of different technologies on the table, on the cards to provide that decarbonized power that we need for net zero. And the good news is we need a lot of everything if demand is going to grow that much. So everyone's a winner, in one sense.

But I think with a expected heavy reliance on offshore wind, it does create particular challenges. If we were in Spain or somewhere with a sunnier climate, then the solar is a little bit different because you get a nice peak in the middle of the day.

And the challenge of moving power from the middle of the day to the evening is maybe a slightly simpler one to solve than wind, whereas in the UK, we get these weather systems that pass over the country relatively slowly. And it will be windy for a sustained period of time and then not windy for a sustained period of time. And it creates a slightly different challenge for storage than perhaps other markets might face.

And what we found is that there's a role for lots of different types of storage. We see at the moment, obviously, batteries hugely important to decarbonizing at the moment. And there will be a range of, as we call them, medium-duration storage technologies. But we found is, actually, there's a real need for very, very long-duration storage technologies to balance out that slightly seasonal or multiday, multiweek intermittency that is particular to the wind in this country.

Yeah. No, totally agreed. I think there's definitely an understanding that we're not going to have a one-size-fits-all approach for storage and flexibility. I think one of the things that surprised, I think, some listeners is the degree to which hydrogen forms such a central part of that longer-duration storage piece. Could you tell us a little bit more about how hydrogen ended up being that balancing role?

Yeah. So hydrogen is a key part of the government's decarbonization strategy for a range of sectors.

So whether it's industry, probably some transports, and then a lot of debate around heating, probably less of a role in heating but maybe some. So there's a huge expected demand for hydrogen outside of the power sector.

And what we found is that there are synergies with the power sector as a result of that. So in order to supply the hydrogen for outside the power sector, there's a lot of capacity for hydrogen production, hydrogen storage that then leads to synergies with the power sector.

And the other advantage that hydrogen has is that it's one of the few technologies that has the ability to provide terawatt-hour-scale storage.

So for a heavy electrified future, we need terawatt hours of storage to produce power over those extended low-wind periods or, indeed, to soak up the wind over those extended high-wind periods.

And I'm aware that hydrogen is sort of a bit like Marmite at the moment. Some people love it, and some people hate it.

But based on the scenarios that we ran, based on the particular cost assumptions that we agreed with [? Bayes, ?]

the fact that hydrogen is able to have that terawatt-hour-scale storage in salt caverns or other forms of geological storage and provide those synergies with the nonpower sector led to it being a key part of the mix that came out of our modeling, which is interesting because we're starting from zero. And we're saying it's a key part of what 2050 might look like. It creates a huge lot of uncertainties on how we get there.

Yeah. So there's lots of good bits in there and also a great bit on Marmite and hydrogen, which is--

I just made that up. I'm going to remember that one.

Yeah, definitely. But I think there's a interesting bit there on timing.

So you mentioned that this is almost like a 2050 lens on. So I think a lot of people today would look at the hydrogen business and say, well, actually, what we see today doesn't actually match up with that vision. We're not seeing people run gigawatt or terawatt-scale conversion of electricity into hydrogen to sit in salt caverns to then be burnt as part of the power network. And that feels like it's probably quite a long way off.

I absolutely agree. Yeah. I think quite a long way off. Just having the sheer additional volume of offshore wind to provide that additional power to fuel those electrolyzers--

I think that is a long way off.

And I think the other thing with hydrogen is that whereas other storage technologies might be a single asset. So you have a pumped hydro, a compressed air, a vanadium battery, a lithium battery, an ion battery. These are single assets. There's a level of complexity to making them work and having a positive business case, but they're a single asset.

Hydrogen is much more complicated because the full storage package is a bundle of technologies. So you need to have the electrolyzer in the right place. You need to have some way of getting the hydrogen from the electrolyzer to the salt cavern.

Yeah, which would be a--

JOHN PERKINS: And then a pipeline, probably.

Yeah, almost certainly a pipe--

JOHN PERKINS: Doesn't exist yet.

--not some sort of compressed hydrogen. It'd be a pipe. OK.

Yeah, maybe convert the gas network, but potentially a brand-new pipe. Then some more pipes, maybe from the salt cavern to the industrial cluster or the CCDT that's going to burn it. So huge, huge infrastructure challenges as a result of trying to put all of those pieces of the--

And some compression and a throttle somewhere in there and then something to do--

like to check with any kind of leakage, maybe, on that system. And then when it comes out at the far end--

so that was really interesting. So you said it came to a cluster.

And I think for power people, I think they would look at hydrogen's role in all this and say, well, then how do you get hydrogen from--

hydrogen into power that meets your cold winter's week, where there's no solar and there's no wind? What fills that gap?

So in the power world, I think people would say, well, you'd run it through some reciprocating engine. Or you might even build a CCDT for it, which would be kind of a lot of money to build something that's quite efficient for something that you're only going to use for a short period of time. But you were saying it's a cluster. So that more makes me feel like it's going into factory production, almost like to make things that hydrogen does today, like ammonia or fertilizer.

Yeah, I guess potentially a bit of both. And that's where the synergies come in. Because if you've got an industrial end user demand and you can site a hydrogen-fired power station alongside, I think that's the kind of thing we were getting at where you might have some synergies between the nonpower and the power sectors that maybe tipped our modeling and the scenarios that we considered towards that as a key solution.

I mean, it wasn't the only solution.

And there were scenarios we ran where hydrogen formed a lower part of the mix.

And I think where that happens, I guess there are alternatives, potentially gas with CCUS or, indeed, some of these various long-duration storage technologies. But the key point being is that it's got to be something that can provide power over like a two-week period or even a month.

Yeah. Yeah, OK. No, I think that's really interesting. I think there's so much that needs to be done between now and 2050 to prove those business cases, whether it's a medium-duration or long-duration storage tech that's in development right now or whether it's CCUS or whether it's like additional nuclear with biomass or it is hydrogen. None of those business cases, from my point of view, appear to have the maturity at the moment to deliver it. And so it feels so hard to be able to say, oh, actually, in 2050, this will be it.

Yeah, absolutely. Completely, completely agree with you that it's all to play for with exactly what 2050 is going to look like. And I think that's where the report was quite in favor of some of these other technologies because you've got huge deployment risk and huge technology risk around these emerging solutions, like hydrogen, like CCUS. With all of the uncertainties around that where there are some more established storage technologies available today, they start to look quite attractive as a way of mitigating that risk, and particularly the 2035 target as well.

So that was, slightly annoyingly, announced halfway through the project. So it probably didn't factor into the modeling as much as we would have liked. But if we I think put a stronger emphasis on zero-carbon power by 2035, then with all of the risks around these emerging options, some of the more established options would have more of a role to play, I think, if we were to redo the analysis now.

OK. Yeah, that's really interesting. I think it feels like from the industry side, it's just almost like the readiness of certain things. I think if you were to ask industry, so how ready is lithium, you look at it and you go, well, it's doing a gigawatt-plus.

There's 1.8 gigs of lithium on the system today. That's doing quite a lot in terms of dynamic containment. And it will go on to do additional things alongside mandatory frequency response with big BM units that have been running for donkey's years.

So it's a growing part of the system, and it's also demonstrating what it can do. I think people will see the hydrogen side, and they'll see it doing ammonia and fertilizer today. But the stretch from meeting all of those existing hydrogen needs through other interesting things that you could use hydrogen for, like I don't know, places where there isn't a plug, effectively, to then see hydrogen coming into the power system, you kind of feel like it's one of the last things that you would use hydrogen for.

And so if I was to look from the outside and say, well, I don't know too much about this industry. What would be a really good indicator for any of these technologies to say, oh, actually, they're doing quite well.

They're looking likely to be one of those techs of the future. What could we look for?

Gosh, it's a really good question.

I think it'll be very interesting to see what happens with the projects that are coming out of [? Bayes's ?]

long-duration storage competition and the funding that they've given.

So there's a range of different technologies there--

the vanadium batteries that you'll be familiar with, compressed air. Compressed air's a really interesting one.

Again, it has that geological storage element. That means it can go to really, really long durations.

And then interesting announcements around for different chemistries for batteries--

we've seen ion batteries and longer-duration lithium batteries in the news a little bit recently. So there's a lot of options. I think it'll be interesting to see what happens where some of these pilots come forward.

And I think having a really good diversity at the moment is no bad thing.

And I think different business models will emerge over time. And I'm not really answering the question there.

But I think it's very difficult to say because there's a lot of different options on the table. And I think that's a good thing.

Exactly. It's kind of like you get everyone to the start of the race. You make sure everyone gets through the R&D stage, where they can build something that's 1-megawatt, 5-megawatt size. And then you let them get into the market and do commercial things and prove out business cases.

And if they try and prove it out, and it turns out that, actually, it's really bloody hard to do this thing, and let's say--

Yeah, just like it's not possible to realize the cost curve that they might like. So a lot of these technologies today--

extremely expensive, very, very capital intensive. And I guess you look at, are the technologies relying on established things, like compressors or flywheels? Or are they completely new? And therefore what might a cost curve look like?

And some of them will emerge over time as being able to realize a decline from their high cost today. And I think in the future, we'll start to see some of these things emerge and standing on their own two feet.

Agreed. Agreed. I think that's what we'll hopefully see. So to pivot a little bit back to where the market is today, so today we've got a lot of batteries on the system. Batteries are, by and large, doing ancillary services.

We've seen the ancillary service market being sort of oversubscribed. And now we're seeing batteries going into wholesale trading. I suppose the balance is going to be that batteries going from what they do today to that transition period going into that 2050 low-carbon solution--

how do we see batteries' role changing over time?

Yeah, a really good question. I mean, the appetite for batteries at the moment is huge. If you look at the TEC Register, 25 gigawatts or something with connections for standalone batteries, 40 gigawatts in development, it is huge.

Let's earmark TEC Register. So Transmission Entry Capacity, is that right?

That's right. Yeah, that's right.

And it effectively is--

It's just a list of the projects that are in development and when they have got an agreement to connect to the system at some point in the future. So it's kind of an indication of the appetite for a given technology and the development pipeline out there, let's say. And the appetite is huge at the moment.

And we look at the tech register, and we see it's chockablock with big projects coming to market soon. What do we think those big projects are going to do in the next 10-year time frame?

I think I heard a quote from somebody that at some point said that batteries have got no natural competitors. I think the natural competitors that batteries have had have got too many other batteries. And it'd be interesting to see what happens if we get a really large quantity of batteries on the system.

I think for me, what it just shows is that not all battery projects are equal. And not all revenue stacks are the same.

And I think the last year or so, there's maybe been a bit of a clustering of battery performance because there's a relatively transparent ancillary service market. And guys like yourselves are doing a really good job of giving all the tricks away that somebody has managed to notice.

So I think there's been a bit of a clustering, maybe, of battery performance. And I think what we'll start to see is that there will be a much wider spread of battery performance going forwards. And it'll be really key for people to have the right projects in the right location with the right revenue-stacking potential and probably the right financing in place to be able to ride out any years where there are any bumps in the road.

And I think we'll start to see that, actually, the average will be one thing. But there will be a huge spread of battery performance around that average depending on whether people have managed to find a good business model, a good revenue stack, and a good location.

Yeah, yeah. And I think crucial to that--

and it's linked to some of the regulatory change that's going on at the moment--

is that location piece.

So one of the big questions that's come up in REMA is this idea of locational pricing. And so how do you think people looking at the market should be translating that move to a more locational market?

Really, really difficult to quantify exactly what it's going to look like.

And we do, in a way, have a locational value through the balancing mechanism at the moment. It's implicitly a locational market. And we've been really active in supporting people who are looking at putting batteries in good locations and trying to work out what a good location means.

Obviously, a lot of interest in batteries in Scotland at the moment, with people thinking that they'll be able to provide constraint management services on those batteries soaking up the excess renewables that the transmission system can't integrate. Other places around the country also, potentially East Anglia, similar dynamic going on with the offshore wind expected to connect there.

That's all the wind going into the North Sea, right? So it all comes in to East Anglia. We're then thinking, can that network take it? Maybe, maybe not.

Are there enough capacity on the pylons? If not, then having a battery in that location means you can store that excess renewable energy and then use it later on and, by doing that, avoid wasting wind energy that can't be accommodated on the grid. So really, really positive thing to happen but not an easy thing to get right.

So, again, coming back to what I said earlier about how wind has a sort of a multiday dynamic to it, what we see in our analysis is that constraints in Scotland can get really, really long. So you can get one-week periods. If you look at some of the key constraints on the transmission network, in the future it's possible that there'll be congestion that lasts for 5, 10 days at a time, which is quite difficult for a two-hour battery. If you fill a battery waiting for there to be capacity to discharged, it's not clear what you do.

So I think those batteries that are being built in Scotland, they need to have factored into their business case other things as well, alongside the constraint management and working out exactly how far north in Scotland do they want to go. Where's the best place for constraint management in Scotland is quite an important question.

It's a really interesting part. Just to go back a step, so you mentioned around how the balancing mechanism is kind of--

at the moment, it's almost this--

we don't explicitly have a locational market. We have a single national price. But we're saying that the balancing mechanism almost acts as a locational piece. So how does that work?

Yes. National Grid are looking at the system in a locational way. So they've, in real time, got to balance all of the constraints for not just meeting demand, but managing the flow of active, reactive power across the network. And they've got to do that on a locational basis.

And so they will be taking actions to bid off generators in certain locations, offer on generators in others, in order to balance all of the constraints that they've got in operating the system. And that means that certain projects in certain locations will expect to have more actions taken in the balancing mechanism than others.

I think maybe as this idea matures a little bit from--

which we're saying, well, OK, so National Grid, ESO are doing a good job in balancing the system through the BM. But when you're taking individual actions like that, that could be difficult to do that in 100% the right way.

And so we're saying, well, actually, is a single national price with some sort of locational balancing mechanism the right thing to do? Or should we look at another option? And this is where part of the remit stuff comes in, which is, should we look at a zonal market, which is essentially dividing the UK up into zones and then dispatching them, having a price with each zone? Or maybe taking an additional level down in terms of granularity and taking it down to individual nodes and dispatching the market with a price at each node? Is there one of those options that you favor?

I think I'd not massively be in favor of the nodal.

I think it creates too much uncertainty at a time where there's a huge amount of investment needed. And maintaining investor confidence, I think, is really, really important at this stage.

So for me, I think it would be possible to realize more of the benefits through zonal and maintain confidence in bringing forward the sheer scale of renewables that we need.

I mean, that's my gut instinct.

We're still sort of puzzling that one out. We've got work ongoing in that area.

None of this is a legally binding position.

But my instinct, I think, is probably towards the zonal, I think.

Yeah.

And I guess what that's doing is that--

those things that happen through the balancing mechanism at the moment--

it's then bringing that some of that responsibility for sorting out some of those locational constraints through into the wholesale market, which I think is why the ESO's come out and National Grid's come out in favor of it. Because they feel that it reduces the scope of what they have to achieve through the balancing mechanism, pushes that job onto the wholesale market to do some of that, respecting some of those locational constraints on the network.

And I think having a zonal market allows, let's say, 80% of that to happen whilst leaving still a significant amount of within-zone balancing for the ESO to do. I think, for me, that might be having the cake and eating it, perhaps.

Yeah, OK. OK.

So I have one more question on this, which is the nodal versus zonal. So I think where concerns lie with zonal versus nodal is that some of the things at the moment which aren't perhaps the most granular or the best indication of how you should be generating come from imperfect signals from things like TNUoS today. And I think one of their concerns around zonal is that you still need some element of a TNUoS charge to effectively control how future energy flows between these zones. And they see that as being somewhat imperfect, whereas in a nodal system, it's maybe theoretically perfect, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So I guess we could get into a slightly involved discussion around financial transaction rights, which maybe we'll sidestep.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

But you could imagine a future that if you're in a node in a disadvantaged part of the grid, you could buy a right to be able to sell your power to a national notional balancing point. And the value of that might look something like TNUoS today. So there are worlds you can imagine that--

yeah.

So this is fascinating. So it feels like--

so you look at our national system, and we have TNUoS and BM actions. And that works well. And I think it's worked--

it works as it works, and it's stable. But then you also have nodal systems elsewhere that work really well. And they're both stable equilibriums.

To get from one to the other seems like it's going to be quite painful. But being in them feels OK as--

being in those markets feels OK.

Yeah. Maybe that's a nice way of putting it, yeah.

I think it's the transition to get there. So maybe if we had a nodal system tomorrow, maybe we'd just have to go on and live with it, accept the reality we're presented with. But it's the hiatus that you then get in order to get there is the concern.

Yeah, exactly. It's the change that could be the problem. And, as you said, investor confidence is critical.

So we've talked a lot about business models and the need for battery storage to bring the right business model and for longer-duration storage to effectively prove that out as it goes along.

There's a couple of people who forecast this space.

And those forecasts range in terms of what they look like for profitability. How important is that range for people building assets for tomorrow?

Yeah.

Obviously, important role for revenue projections in people's business development and their strategies and, obviously, AFRY really, really active in supporting battery developers.

I guess where we come in is that, slightly differently to others, we are perhaps a little bit more on the conservative side than some others.

And I think, potentially, that's a good thing. I think there's a space for that.

And I think what it means is that when people are looking at our forecasts, it makes it a little bit more of a challenge for people to work out what their business model is going to look like. And it forces people to think a little bit more about the precise nature of the revenue stack and the location and the type of storage that's going to work if our forecasts are a little bit more on the conservative side than others.

And yeah, I think we're saying how batteries have been very successful in ancillary services. And potentially, that's led to a slight bunching of revenues. But in the future, I think we'll see a greater diversity of outcomes for battery storage.

And there will be projects that do better than others as they look for the revenue-stacking models that work. And not all locations and projects will be equal.

And so we work really, really hard with developers to help them find projects that are going to be, I guess, in some way, protected against the merchant risks that they're exposed to with a battery, helping them find good locations, good business models, good strategies for their business development. And we're really active in doing that. And I think it's important to have a recognition that there will be some projects that work in the future and some that won't.

OK.

I actually really like that.

As a kind of concept, it would be really bad for industry if everyone had the same methodology for coming out with the same numbers. And there wasn't a sort of--

there wasn't a fundamental difference around how people see the world evolving. It feels like it's a much-needed service to have a bit of balance across how people see.

And I think it comes back to what we were discussing a little bit earlier around long-duration storage that there is a lot of uncertainty as to what it's going to cost to build stuff in the future. And people have cost curves as to what different technologies are going to cost in the future. And as an industry, I think we're really bad at having a good view of what it's going to cost to build solar PV, batteries, any number of different things.

And I guess what we see in our forecasting is that if we believe that there's going to be a strong decline in the cost of building more batteries in the future, then that has an impact on the revenue potential for batteries. And we see potential for cannibalization of value in different markets beyond ancillary services. So we talk about the cannibalization of the value and dynamic containment happening today.

At some point down the line, we will probably start to see cannibalization of value in the balancing mechanism in the intraday market. And having a large quantity of batteries being built at lower cost in the future is maybe what drives that happening in our projections. I think it's a really, really interesting question as to where lithium costs are going to go.

Historically, people have tended to really underestimate the declines in costs for things like wind and solar and probably batteries as well. And we've got to a point now where there's been a bit of an uptick as a result of the global commodity situation, lithium being much more expensive now than it was, say, 18 months ago. And I think a really interesting question is to where that's going to go in the future.

So if we take one view in our scenarios that it's going to be a bit of a recovery and we're going to carry on down that cost curve in the future, that the global car manufacturing business is going to drive the need for lots of lithium, there'll be more lithium mines and therefore cheaper batteries in the future, driving maybe a reduction in revenue potential for batteries as the result of that availability of cheap batteries feeding its effect through into the wholesale market and the balancing mechanism. But that's not the only possible future. You could imagine a world where, because the car industry is taking all of the lithium for electric vehicles, that, actually,

[? grid-scale ?]

storage remains much more expensive.

Perhaps it comes from another source. Yeah, obviously, the industry supply chain is, at the moment, constrained. And we're obviously seeing costs come up as a result of that.

I don't think I've heard anyone kind of say, oh, actually, we're concerned about the overall amount of lithium available that will kind of give us a longer-run more expensive extraction cost.

I think, mostly, the industry is talking around short-term constraints. So feel I like that first scenario you painted of one where this is a sort of short to medium-term hike in lithium pricing is probably--

that feels like where the industry is at the moment. But, I mean, who knows?

Yeah. And if it's not lithium, then, as we said earlier, there's plenty of other technologies that could also be relatively cheap in the future. So I think it comes down to the different scenario approaches that we take.

And I think one of the things that's interesting about modeling battery revenues is that there's a lot of different modeling approaches out there and different levels of sophistication and different approaches to revenue stacking and dealing with imperfect foresight and all of these different topics. And so there's a real diversity and complexity that therefore emerges. And it's sometimes a little bit hard to make sense of why one particular set of projections is different to another.

But I try and simplify it a little bit and say, well, if you could build batteries for a certain price in the future, then that should lead to a certain view of what the revenue potential is in the future. If I could build batteries for very, very cheap amounts, then it might imply that there's going to be quite strong cannibalization of prices available. So at a very high level, I think if you believe that storage is going to get cheaper, then it should lead to a cannibalization of revenue potential through people being able to build lots and lots of cheap storage.

So you're saying, well, if you know what the cost of manufacture is and you take some assumptions around like what finance will cost, you can then apply that to the market and say, well, that means that there'll be this much profit, effectively, to be made to pay for the sort of--

to pay for the business case of this system. And therefore that sets out the boundaries for what the power market might look like in the future. OK.

You explained it much more simply than I did.

Well, I got to go second, you see. That's definitely easier.

Yeah. So I think in high-level terms, that's a key part of how we do our revenue projections. But, obviously, alongside that, we've got dispatch models, like many other people, battery dispatch models and so on and so forth, that we then build scenarios around taking into account all kinds of revenue-stacking business models and costs of investments in the future and so on.

OK. OK, brilliant. Well, I'm going to do one more question.

And it's a bit of a change. So if you were to have your time again, starting off in energy from [INAUDIBLE],, and you're not allowed to work AFRY, and Modo's also out as an option, where would you look? Where do you think someone joining the industry today would find to be a really interesting place to go and work?

Yeah, good question. I mean, I do really like working at AFRY because I'm the master of my own time. And I get a huge diversity of things to do.

That's banned. We will edit that out.

Yeah, thanks.

I think I would be quite attracted to working for someone looking at some of these long-duration storage technologies. It feels like a key missing piece of the jigsaw.

And being involved in bringing something like that to market at scale that's needed, finding the business model that's going to work, I think it would be really an interesting thing to work in. I think the revenue stack for storage is more complicated than anything else. And I think there's a nut to crack there that I think I'd enjoy.

I think that's a good way of putting it. And I think we'll wrap up there. Yeah.

Great.

Brilliant. Well, there you go. Thank you, John, for coming on. Much obliged.

My pleasure.

I really enjoyed talking about all things energy storage. And thank you for listening, and we will see you on our next podcast.

Thank you.