Intelligent Demand: How Consumers Can Support The Grid with Alex Schoch (Octopus Energy)

Hello and welcome to Transmission. Today, we're joined by Alex Schock who is the VP of Flexibility and Electrification at Octopus Energy. This episode is all about intelligent demand. How we can use a wave of upcoming flexibility to deliver the transition at lowest cost to consumers.

How can intelligent demand reset the way that we think about the system moving on from large transmission assets flowing down to consumers, and how can we use data to better inform the consumer led flexibility plans in the future. If you're enjoying transmission, please hit subscribe to stay in the loop. And if you have thoughts on what we're discussing, we always like to hear your views in the comments. Let's jump in.

Hello, Alex, and welcome to Transmission.

Thanks, Ed. Thanks for having me.

Of course. Our pleasure. And, as as always, let's get started with who are you and what's your role in energy markets?

My name is Alex Shock. I'm the group director for electrification and flexibility at Octopus Energy. I've been in the in and around the energy space for over fifteen years now. Started off, at Tesla, with launching the vehicle side of the business and then the energy storage side of the business and then ran the energy storage, business operations globally for a while. So did Hornsdale, the big battery, had fun debates with ESO at the time and the regulator about what batteries were, over ten years ago. And now at Octopus, I really focus on how do you accelerate electrification of different sectors, so transport, heating, industrial processes, but then really focus on how do you take all that electricity demand and integrate it into power systems to bring costs down.

And we're definitely gonna do the the consumer flexibility side on this episode. But since you mentioned Hornsdale and we have listeners in Australia, some people might have joined the sector after that happened. So what's the sort of very quick history of Hornsdale?

I mean, it started out as a Twitter jape. Yeah. As as some listeners may know, with Mike Cannon Brookes and, and Elon. And then it just happened to be that the, that Lyndon Reeve, who was the head of the energy business at the time, was in Australia right then. This was shortly after the big power outage in, South Australia.

And, yeah, we then kind of one thing led to another. And before we do it, we're gonna build a a battery in a hundred days.

That's a famous sort of a battery in a hundred days.

And how how big is Hornsdale just for So the original Hornsdale was a hundred megawatts, hundred and twenty nine megawatt hours from memory.

It's then been at least expanded one time, if not twice since then, which was also the beginning of Tesla's, first show of Tesla's auto bidder software. It was actually the proof of concept for that.

Very good.

Very good. And this it's it was almost that sort of, watershed moment for industry where we realized that we could do something within a hundred days. People always talk about, oh, we could kind of we could be more sort of on a COVID footing or we could be warlike in terms of how we go to stuff, actually doing stuff in a hundred days. I think that really sort of showed how storage is so different to, like, a pumped hydro asset or a nuclear asset just in the speed of of deployment.

I I completely agree. And whether it's, and I think the thing is actually that that statement is true for other technologies as well. So, yes, you know, front of the meter, big batteries can be deployed very quickly. But, you know, what can do deployed even faster is electricity energy assets that have a primary use case that isn't participating in markets.

Yes. Because it's already there. Right? So time to deploy zero minutes.

Yeah. And it's a secondary use case, so essentially free.

I love it. Okay. So let's go to the main question. I think the question that is sort of most important. So how do we get consumer bills down?

It's a that's a a good question. Actually, a very good question. I think, you know, in the absence of, the ability to, and this is a UK specific answer, although a lot of thing is is true, in the absence of the the kind of decision of REMA to look at wholesale market reform, I think the the key thing that we have to do is really fundamentally embrace as a as a energy system demand side flexibility.

And I think if we take a step back, you know, for for as long as integrated power systems have existed, we have had all financial incentives have been on the generation side. We have dispatched and planned generation to serve essentially relatively static kind of load profiles where the variation is really kind of week to weekend and kind of see big seasonality differences.

Whereas in a world of growing abundance of renewables, you you have an increased need of flexibility. And that's really just matching supply and demand, right? So so, you know, in some ways, well, in in many ways flexibility is not new. It's been it's it's been a core component of any power system as long as we've had power systems.

But what we're talking about now is how do we move the financial incentives and from purely on the generation side to storage, whether that's large scale storage or and to demand in general. And how do we and as we electrify more sectors, whether that's transport or heating or kind of growth of microgeneration, all of those are very fungibly and kind of shapeable demand profiles. And so suddenly, you can start actively turning up demand when you have excess renewables in a specific region or as a whole country. And that can be cheaper than curtailing it or and then kind of firing up some thermal assets where you need them.

Yeah. It's it's a really important idea. I think, one thing that we should definitely do to start off with is just to talk about some of the numbers around that. So do you want to talk about the sort of scale of of consumer led flexibility in GB today, but then also like where it might go to in the future as well?

So, you know, I think the the the government recently published a consumer flexibility roadmap, where, you know, there was reference to a, a targeted number. I think, I believe it was twelve gigawatts. Twelve gigawatts by which date? By two thousand and thirty. Now that's really lowballing actually. I mean, just Octopus alone, we have, just shy of two gigawatts of, assets, kind of consumer assets under management today in our virtual power plant, and that is growing exponentially.

And, you know, if you just think about it in terms of, you know, we have what?

One point seven million EVs on the road. So what's that? Already like nine gigawatts worth worth of potential flexibility? Now, of course, they're not plugged in all the same all at the same time, but then if you think about the context of saying we need twelve gigawatts on the system by two thousand and thirty, if we already essentially have we're, you know, three quarters there, I think it can be much larger.

Yes. It it feels like it. And and just, you know, kinda to be clear, the maths you're doing there, right, is you're saying take an EV and sort of implied within that, we're saying that EVs are a big chunk of this demand. And maybe correct me if that's if that's wrong, in a second, but you're saying essentially you have a million EVs, or you said one point seven, but for easy math, let's say a million, and, you've then got charging point of seven kilowatts. So a million seven kilowatts, that's giving you the sort of seven gigs of flexibility?

Yeah, essentially and then, you know, they're not plugged in at the same time but, you know, reliably, you know, we have, we collect five billion data points every day across our fleet and we have, you know, really high visibility to what is the actual trend of how many cars plug in every day, know, how much do they need to charge and within that you see like you actually have this really big resource pool. And you know, once you combine cars charging at night at home, cars charging at work and workplace charging, cars charging on the go And you're right, EVs is a big part of that, but it's definitely not the only technology.

Okay.

Home batteries are are kind of are growing rapidly. The UK has actually been, you know, at the forefront of the home battery kind of markets in Europe for some time. Kinda leaders have traditionally been Germany, where there was lots of regulatory support as well, Italy, and then the UK because UK's always kinda been in the top three residential battery markets, and then heat pumps as well. So in terms of like the like what we think about or what I think about is the holy trinity of like the consumer low carbon technology. It's EVs and charge points, heat pumps, and solar and batteries.

Okay. Amazing. We'll come back to, home batteries in a second. I think really interesting just to talk a little bit about the type of flexibility you get out of, the EV fleet that you have. So, when people kind of historically come to flexibility, they might think about a large gas unit that can ramp up and ramp down within half an hour or an hour. You think about pumped hydro, maybe it can go from being sort of a sort of spinning start to ramp up thirty seconds a minute. Maybe if they're slightly more sort of up to date, they might think about batteries, grid scale batteries that can turn on or turn off within a hundred milliseconds.

Those assets are also designed around flexibility. They're not doing too much else, so they they can be really flexible. When you talk about that sort of number of EVs, that's a really big number in terms of potentially being like seven gigs.

That isn't something that you'd expect to sort of be able to ramp up, ramp down every single half an hour, but you'd you'd kind of use it in a slightly less continuous way. Does is it is that a sort of fairway? So the really what I'm trying to get to here, or maybe I'll use my words better, is the type of flexibility you get from the EV fleet, is it as dispatchable as, say, some of the traditional flexibility we've seen?

By and large, yes. Although, I think, you know, and this may be, you know, a somewhat, like, heretical view, but, large scale batteries are brilliant. They're brilliant at many, many things, but I think they're very, very, very well positioned for super fast reacting services. So whether that's frequency, whether that's voltage, whether that's quick reserve, and, you know, these services will continue to actually get faster. Whereas as you kind of go down the totem pole of how quickly assets need to react, you actually have, you know, a growing set of other categories. So, you know, like, what's your active if you have a a two minute activation, a five minute activation, a fifteen minute activation.

And, you know, we, on a daily basis, kind of dispatch and shape how much power we kind of deliver to our VPP fleet and how we shape that, you know, down to, you know, fifteen minute, even ten minute granularity depending.

And do you get a lot of flexibility in terms of the different ages of EVs? So, I mean, just just taking EVs as as an example. I know they're not everything, but do you get different flexibility in terms of the ages of EVs that you've got, the size of EV, and obviously some are V2G, some aren't? Yes.

I mean, just like it's a heterogeneous pool of assets that, you know, older EVs often have smaller batteries.

You then have degradation curves, but honestly these things all just kind of factor into, like, if you sign up for Intelligent Octopus Go as a customer, you know, you sign up in the app and you kind of put in what your car is and what charge point you have and then we authenticate and, and as part of that onboarding, we, you know, have a big data set and we say, cool, this car, this is the, you know, usable energy capacity. It's this old. Our forecast model and kind of available battery is this. We know that we know we know the mileage. We therefore have basically built a little virtual twin of that specific car. That gets rolled up into all of the other ones and then it's, you know, a series of pretty complex probabilistic forecasting about what you can get.

Okay. And maybe just describe what, Intelligent Octopus Go is.

Absolutely. So Intelligent Octopus Go is one of the many different smart tariffs that we offer. This one is specifically kind of catered for, homes that have an EV, where we offer super cheap smart charging, where we will manage the charge of the car, within the customer preferences, but whilst also helping balance the grid, trading the aggregated power, and and and, delivering those services. So in terms of, like, our merit order of what do we solve for, absolutely first rank is always when when does the car need to be ready and at what state of charge does it need to be? Everything else kind of is secondary to that because, you know, as we talked about before, this is a this use case is secondary. The primary use case of a car is mobility. So that can never be compromised.

Yeah. So I I know that I need to go and pick up a friend from the train station in half an hour. I must have charge in that half an hour time. So that that is sort of nonnegotiable, but I've come back from wherever, and I've no. I've got a week before I use the car next.

Feel free to use that flexibility. I I don't need to charge it in the next half an hour. Yeah. Okay. And and to go all the way back, so we started off looking at a twelve gig number from government by two thousand and thirty.

Where do you think this might get to in the future? So let's paint a picture of where do we think consumer led flexibility could get to.

I mean, there is, you know, there is no reason this can't be tens of gigawatts of of available assets and and or of dispatchable kind of power. As trans as as kind of, you know, at the moment we have one point seven million EVs on the road. I think the total fleet of cars on UK roads is, like, thirty five million. So, you know, like you said before, it's kind of like simple math.

Same thing with, at the moment, we've got an install base of residential solar systems that are mostly without batteries, but as more and more kind of customers install solar with batteries, you start having that kind of growing fleet. You know, heat pumps have already gone from essentially a standing start to a hundred thousand installed nationally per year, and I think it'll continue to grow up. Heat pumps, we've shown that with kind of simple scheduling, we've been able to kind of shape the whole household demand, and move to, over half of the total electricity consumption in that twenty four hour period to six hours.

So to a low cost period in the early morning and a low cost period in the afternoon, while simultaneously reducing by a third the total peak power kind of so between four four PM and seven PM. So, like, that is the you know, to your point about is it dispatchable? No. But it's a shapeable, load.

Yeah. It's really interesting. We've definitely been looking at lots of heat pump data to I mean, we think that heat pumps will be largely how the UK gets its heating. Note, the hydrogen for heating, probably not a good idea.

So we expect that we will see heat pumps all across the UK. And the reason why we think about that is because of the demand load. And so we have definitely noticed that heat pumps do use more energy in mornings and evenings, but it's really interesting to hear how some of like, not all of that is flexible, but some of it is flexible. I think that is, again, another example of where the sort of forecasting and thinking around flexibility is going to evolve as we have more of these systems systems in place.

Okay. So we've done DSR in terms of, where we are today, where we might be in terms of the future, and maybe kind of going from twelve gigs in twenty thirty, if we get to twenty million EVs, that number is sort of in the eighty to a hundred gig type type size. So that that is that is huge. And then kind of to go to go one step further, do you think that the government is looking in the right place when they are kind of trying to drive for that level of flexibility?

So look, I think it's great that we had the, the roadmap, the flexibility roadmap published by government, the promulgation of the idea of a flex champion, with some sort of kind of ministerial level, kind of deigned authority to kind of convene tracking of, you know, is the industry pulling in the right direction, are kind of milestones being hit, That, you know, dynamic network pricing is something that really needs to urgently be looked at, and given the pace at which kind of network charging reforms take, they that couldn't come sooner. However, you know, if we put this in the context of this kind of clean power twenty thirty timeline, we've got fifty two months.

Fifty two months is actually a pretty short amount of time. And I think there's two major things that, we need like, where this roadmap at least falls short. One is, final consumption levies, which are kind of the policy costs that get laboured onto electricity. They are a substantial kind of hindrance to unlocking a large amount of demand flexibility. And there's no real timeline on reform and, you know, I think there's a site there's, like, a footnote saying, you know, if parliament gets time, we'll look at this kind of thing, which is quite problematic because, as as you well know, the the kind of the battery industry, so the utility scale battery industry, has been exempt to final consumption levy since, I believe, twenty seventeen.

That's about right.

Yeah. And so that's, you know, and that's a a fundamental element because, if we if we kind of take a step back and we think about, you know, there's really cheap abundant power available, we have shown that consumers will turn up and consume that excess power locally. So not burdening the whole energy system. But with the way that these consumption levies work is that we're actually financially penalized to do so.

Same as, you know, home like, really exploiting the opportunities in home batteries and vehicle to grid is not doesn't really pencil anywhere near as well as it could, unless there's a reform. And I think the other thing is market access. So this is, you know, it's an it's a a resource class. It should have level access you know, level playing field access to all markets and services as long as it can deliver that service.

It's currently in the road map left to NISO and their kind of market roadmap thing, kind of timeline, which doesn't really have a timeline.

So if I think about it from the perspective of, like, how do we actually get here in fifty two months, we need some hard dates and the appropriate people held to account.

So turning this into tactics and, like, how do we actually execute this? Like, we I think maybe if I try and listen sort of what's what's sort of going on behind the scenes, it feels like there's very much a known strategy for getting bills down, right, which is we have this flexibility. We know that there are assets out there that we can be using both grid scale and and sort of at the home level. But, really, we are struggling to get the most of these assets at the moment.

I will just comment on the the the grid scale battery side. The big sort of point at which that that that turned was that, obviously, it's a final consumption levy consumption. The the batteries themselves, they aren't consuming that energy. They are consuming some of it in terms of around to efficiency.

They would lose, say, fifteen percent. But, actually, the bulk of the energy is then coming back out and going on to the the wider system. And so at that point, I think Ofgen gen went, oh, god. This actually doesn't really make much sense that we're charging this.

And I can see so many parallels to let's say, I've got an EV at home and back to EVs again. Maybe I'll swap solve it for a home battery. Let's say I've got a home battery at home, and I want to use that. I want to import when it's really cheap overnight, and I want to export in the peak.

Like, there should be there's no reason why that battery should have to pay a final consumption levy. Right? It's it's it's the same principle. It's not actually consuming that energy.

Yeah. Okay. So really you're calling out for very much a delivery of the plans in terms of flexibility.

From an Octopus point of view, sometimes I think that, consumers see a lot of kind of conversations around energy, and it's very much a, you know, can be really involved in politics.

Do you do you think that consumers will start to take more of this into their own hands and they will start to say, hey. Look. You know, my energy bills have been going up. I I actually I'm just gonna I am gonna get an EV, or I am gonna get a a heat pump because I'm I'm sort of sick of my gas bill. I am going to bring solar onto my roof. Do do you think that there will be much more sort of micro consumption, microgeneration coming through?

Yes. I mean, I think, especially as we have, you know, we're we're seeing the continued cost declines of EVs and now, you know, we now have, you know, the the the the new government support mechanism is targeting only kind of very kind of low cost EVs, for example, which kind of really shows that there's a a trajectory there. Same thing with, like, the continued declining costs of residential solar and batteries and, you know, like, our zero bills, proposition where we work with home builders to kind of specifically design whole kind of new home tracks being built, to be kind of solar powered with batteries and heat pumps.

And we kinda manage all of that within the customer preferences, and the kind of the the return for the customer is no electricity bills for ten years. And that's, you know, as you buy the house and you buy the house because it's a zero bills home and it has no electricity bills. And we have people living in these homes today. That being said, you know, not everyone can afford, you know, there there is still a an element where not everyone can afford to kind of, you know, spend money on on these things, which is why I think it's equally important that we are able to unlock other forms of kind of flexible or, like, flexible enabled kind of participation services.

So things like the demand flexibility service, or for Octopus, we called it Saving Sessions. You know, the vast majority of of of the, you know, million and a half, almost two million customers that signed up to participate in Saving Sessions don't have low carbon tech in their homes today. Our agile tariff, which is a a wholesale tracker tariff where the the price per kilowatt hour is changed every half hour based on wholesale price, a third of those customers don't have kind of low carbon tech in the home and are still able to save over three hundred pounds versus the kind of kind of standard price cap.

I I think those are some really interesting dynamics starting to come through in the market. You know, one thing that we probably think about a lot is sort of where the overall wholesale price is going. And sometimes in summer, we see very high solar generation, the the grid level, which can bring wholesale power prices down to to zero.

And I suppose you're sort of saying, well, actually, if if you give people the right supplier, rates, then you can allow them to react, you know, that that is that is over over to them in terms of how they would want to react to those prices. And so even if you don't have solar panels on your roof, you can still benefit from very low wholesale rates in the market with a much more flexible tariff.

Yeah. And I and and I think, yes, you're right. And then the addition to that is more dynamic network tariffs, which will then also incentivize kind of more consumption and being able to really distribute, the cost of managing our system. Because I think, you know, at its core, what we're seeing here is a change in how power systems need to be run.

And we need to kind of stop thinking about solving for peak power and kind of building systems with a huge amount of headroom because, you you know, the low voltage network is a black hole and we don't actually know what's happening because power flow is one way. You know, we're we're far beyond that, but we haven't really caught up from a overall whole system thinking. And I think we need to really move to how do we think about whole system utilization? How do we think about transmission and distribution system utilization?

Utilize the and that this is by no means saying we don't need to build more transmission distribution because we do, simply by virtue of the amount of load growth that we're gonna have. We're seeing the amount of new kind of generation projects we want to connect. But we can't just, you know, unilaterally just build more, have a gold plated system because that will simply cost too much.

And so we have to think about how we manage a system super, super efficiently with very high utilization rates, obviously, within safety constraints.

Yes. I I totally I totally agree. Maybe a a point of challenge would be that I I buy into the the future where we have lots of solar, wind, and flexibility from homes as well as grid scale batteries, and that gives us, for a large chunk of the year, some extremely low costs. And I think that is gonna be really, really good news for consumers as soon as we can get them. And every sort of incremental step we make on on on the sort of journey to that is is is good news.

There is a sort of a bit of a sticking point, I would say, around those occasions where flexibility can't quite resolve the problem. So the kinda classic example would be a winter period where we have high demand because there's high heating coming through. We want to charge the EVs, but there's not sort of wind and solar, because it's not very windy and it's not very sunny. And so I would say that here, there's kind of there's an interesting point where you're absolutely right. There's this kind of this really flexible world we can create, which might be, say, just for for the sake of argument, ninety five percent of the year, we can get really low bills. Do you think we still need to have some kind of, like, reserve or some kind of, almost like an insurance payment that goes to a part of the network that is is there and can get us through a a sort of two, three week period?

I would I would frame that in terms of yes, but.

Okay.

Look. I think if we if we look at the amount of interconnectors that are already kind of connected to the GB Energy system, the more that are in the pipeline, we've got, like, you know, tremendous advances on long duration energy storage, which can offer, you know, significant steps towards that. And I think what you said is actually really apposite. Like, we should not focus on, like, a hundred percent renewable energy system. And we can get to, you know, eighty five, ninety percent within the existing technology set. Yes. There is there is, speed and tactical delivery elements and the need to kind of think about things more holistically.

So, yeah, that would be my answer.

Okay. Okay. Interesting. And I think maybe when I kinda think about the the concept of, zero cost homes, I think that, there's an element of, like, standing charge versus unit rate that I I think that from a unit rate perspective, I think people might pay nothing. If I go forward ten, fifteen years, I I wonder whether the standing charge might be more like, might be thought more by people as around like an insurance premium just to make sure the network's there if you need it, for some particular weeks of the year. Whether that then adds up to a cost that's greater than zero or less than zero, I I don't really know. But I think people's thinking around how they use the grid might change.

Yeah. And I think, I don't think we were gonna see, like, wholesale grid defection. I I just I just don't think that makes makes sense. Although Pakistan's seeing that in droves.

Right? And that's just, to the point that it's, you know, the deployment of solar and battery, of low cost solar and batteries has gone so quickly that the grid operators literally are not collecting enough revenue to kind of keep their, you know, their operations afloat. But I think the, I think there are tremendous advances that are happening in the GB energy space. I think there is a, there's a general acknowledgement of, like, the need to evolve how the power systems have run.

I think the general, like, my general call to action would be, you know, yes, CP two thousand and thirty is a bit of an arbitrary time, you know, line in the sand, but it's it's a good marketing call because we have to get we have to get people's bills down. Like and that's not that's consumers as well as businesses. Otherwise, you know, it's it's not a pretty place to be the the the country with the most expensive power in the OECD.

And we've seen that groups like Germany have moved certain costs, from subsidy schemes into general taxation.

Yes. Twenty thirty is sort sort of an arbitrary date, but also politically, it becomes quite interesting. So do you think that there's there's gonna be sort of the will to potentially move some of the elements of those bills into general taxation before we get to the next round of elections?

That That is a very interesting question, and, I don't think I have a a crystal ball quite quite that that, that precise.

But I think I think right now, we're trend we're on arrest. To do that, we need to unleash the ability for suppliers, for aggregators, for other market participants to be able to monetize all of this kind of available flexible demand, help it bring down system balancing costs, and put money back in people's pockets.

I I totally agree. I think it's just such an important part of how this how this all pencils out. So just then going from the short term of of sort of the political horizons out until two thousand and fifty, like, are there some really big schemes that you think need to be fixed or some amendments need to be made to the power market? Like, where where do you see this all falling over long run? Because I think we have a shared view of getting to eighty five percent is very doable with what we've got. How how do we actually get this working if we go to two thousand and forty, two thousand and fifty, and potentially have a net zero system?

I think the key one of the key questions is, are we able to run systems, more effectively? And and I think, you know, that really comes down to one of the potential risks of a heavily renewable, like, renewable generation heavy is that you actually have huge overproduction, which, you know, fundamentally unless someone's underwriting that makes it a non investable case. So, I think, again, it comes to how do we build enough that we are meeting demand, that we create also an effective offtake base load, if you will, that can be through, I do think that will naturally occur as electricity kind of continues to become one of the primary energy vectors.

Okay. Yeah. Really interesting.

Okay. So in terms of, moving us through, I think that's given us a really good view of what the near term looks like in terms of flexibility and also sort of what we might expect to see in the long term plus some of the key data points that Octopus are seeing from from your side in terms of whether it's EVs, whether it's home batteries, whether it's flexibility from from heat pumps.

I hope that's given people a really good kinda context of of how this space works and also given people a bit of positivity as well in terms of how this might actually be able to move without having to build a two gigawatt gas unit or a two gigawatt nuclear unit, what whatever that might be. So we can do stuff at a micro level. One thing that we mentioned right at the start, and I'd like to come back to, is this kind of concept that, energy is generated by massive plants, and then that flows down to consumers' homes. And it is all big stuff flows to small stuff. And that's how we think about the world, and that is the only thing that's reliable. The big units are reliable, and the small stuff doesn't work. How do we break that narrative?

Through ongoing proof points. Like, I mean, you know, twenty years ago, no one would have thought that a mobile phone is, like, reliable to do banking on. I mean, okay. Bit of a stretch of analogy, but I think there's, it it has you you just have to start looking at evidence.

And I think, you know, forget even, like, little stuff is reliable. So when we bid into, when Octopus bids into the Demand Flexibility Service, that is primarily almost exclusively a behavioral kind of dispatch. So, you know, we message customers and, tell them that, you know, if they wanna participate in the session, it's at this time and to, you know, click if they wanna opt in. We have over ninety percent forecast accuracy of how much we're going to turn up or turn down, with a four hour notice.

I mean, NISO's wind forecast is up to a hundred percent wrong eight hours out.

So I think all these things just go to say that give new technologies and new participation asset classes the opportunity to compete, measure them on a like for like basis, and then you will see that, you know, these things actually do deliver.

And as ever, like, I think it's the the thing that kinda counts as that sort of fear or uncertainty comes from data. Right? The you can put data down, you can show people how it works. All of a sudden, it's so much easier for people to grasp what this kind of core concept is. It's so important. If if people wanted to get a bit more of an idea around some of the data points that you talked about from Octopus today, like how how would you do that?

So we actually have a a huge amount of content on our on our website and, like, we have a prolific amount of blogs that, that we kind of publish and put out there.

Because one of the core things that we believe in is that, and I personally believe in as well, which is, like, these transitions, when they are demand led, they happen overnight. You don't, you, like, you can't centrally plan them. And, you know, that's why, you know, we've talked about EVs so much, is that five years ago there were almost no EVs kind of being registered every month. And now fifty percent of all cars going on UK roads. And like that, that that speed of transition, that pace, that pull effect is just so transport formative that if you don't embrace it, like, you'll just be left in the wind.

Okay. I totally agree. I think this kind of this transition happens as and in a very cumulative way. So you you kind of on the face of it, you might say, oh, well, only fifty percent of new cars being added every month.

Well, you know, compared to the overall fleet of cars, that's not that big. But when you look at these things over over a sort of, longer time frame with the same cumulative behavior, things are actually changing quite quickly even though they might not feel like they are from month to month. Yeah. Okay.

Fascinating. And then getting us through to sort of final two questions. So, first question, is there anything you'd like to plug?

The importance of demand turn up as a very, very vital tool in bringing down system costs, This is not just, and this is, you know, whether it's running electrolyzers or Bitcoin kind of mining farms or individual consumers on a kind of locational and temporal basis is an incredibly important tool that we do not talk about enough from a energy system perspective.

Yes. And this is effectively trying to say, well, look, if we've got, the classic example would be wind in the north of Scotland, but maybe let's let's let's, mix it up a little bit. Let's talk about solar in the southwest. And so let's say we have a lot of solar in the southwest and we're struggling to get it all up into the the middle of the country. We're saying, actually, wouldn't it be a good thing if instead of having to build in addition to all of the transmission lines being considered, we might be able to get more demand to be on the grid in those locations. And so that is a is a way of balancing the system potentially at lower cost rather than building out lots of network build out.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. And then final question, is there a contrarian view that you hold, something that you believe that the majority of the market doesn't?

There there is no cataclysmic battle being waged between large scale battery owners and traders and the part of the market that is looking at overall kind of demand flexibility. These things are equally important and are actually complementary.

It is a question that comes up a huge amount in sort of investment committees around sort of what is DSR doing and what are what are batteries doing and and how much do they sort of compete and fight with each other? When when we look at the broader picture, even with huge growth in DSR, we definitely see, a huge growth of of where batteries can be and how big that fleet can be. So we definitely see that complementary role coming through.

I think I think I think genuinely considering how many times we've been asked it. So, yeah, I think that's a very interesting point to to leave the interview on in terms of, the performance of DSR versus big batteries. Alex, thank you very much for coming on. We've covered a whole range of things on the on the DSR side from EVs, one final mention, through to potential future government policy. So, yeah, thank you for coming.

Thanks for having me. One last thing. We gotta stop calling it demand side response. Oh. It demand side response is responding to having too many nukes and too too many coal power stations that you needed to kind of levelize your demand out. We need to talk about intelligent demand.

Intelligent demand. I love it. Let's do it in a future episode. Alex, thank you very much for coming on.

Thanks for having me.