Modo Selects - Improving Europe's renewable infrastructure with Hannah Staab

I think there's a school of thought that says, if you're gonna build a wind farm here anyway and have to go through all of that, why not add solar? Why not add storage? Put it all in one place. And the other obvious argument is grid, and you talk to any developer pretty much anywhere in Europe these days they're all gonna have a moan about grid.

Not surprising that developers are thinking about, how do I use that spare capacity, you can combine wind and solar, you can combine and storage. People are now talking about combining hydrogen and and lots of other stuff as well. But yeah, it comes down to how do you make the most of your grid connection? Also spread cost that frankly is a big part of your your construction cost.

It's actually paying for that grid connection, spread it across multiple projects. Hello, and welcome back for another installment of the modo select series where we revisit some of our earlier episodes. This episode is with Hannah Starb, who at the time was head of advisory for Europe, now head of strategy at Nat willpower. If you're enjoying the podcast, please consider hitting like and subscribe.

It really helps us reach a wider audience. And with that, let's jump in.

Hello, Hannah. Thanks for calling on podcast. If anyone's listening again, this is another one we've we've been asking for I've been one of those people asking for rain for weeks. Now it has, and it's really loud outside.

Yeah. We're gonna do this for the backdrop of some, relaxing rain drop noises. We've got Hannah Starbon from Natural Power. Hannah, thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me. And today, we're gonna talk about all sorts of stuff. Wind and solar parks, or hybrid parks, parks is the new word, and what you do at natural power, and generally what's going on in colocated batteries. Hannah, do you wanna just introduce yourself?

What do you do? Where do you come from? And, yeah, how do we know each other? Yeah.

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

If you can hear squelp things, that is That is my trainers. Yeah.

But, yeah, I we know each other from pretty much a few years of just being in the battery industry, going to the same events, talking to each other about revenue stacking and what's new for the UK market. I have been in the renewable industry for about ten years. I started out working for a developer, and then I've been working in Natural Power for the last five years. So Natural Power is a Technical and engineering consultancy, we work exclusively on renewable energy and and some clean storage projects. We are originally from Scotland, although I'm based in London. And we're about four fifty people worldwide, so focused on the kind of UK European and US markets.

And natural power is it only works on natural power stuff. Right? So it's only renewables and clean stuff. The name is a giveaway.

Yeah. So That is important. Right. Work on gas speakers for example, that's not natural enough for it.

Is there another consultancy that can say that? Is there another one that's that's so I'm sure there are, but Everrose, are they anything? Yeah.

K two, I think, maybe do optional wind or wind energy. So are others. So It's pretty strong. It's pretty strong.

Yeah. And I think we've definitely seen a consolidation in consultancies in the market where others have been absorbed bigger companies who also work on wider infrastructure and energy projects. So we're very proud of still being independent and also purely having that renewable net zero transition focus. I have, props, and you guys have been doing it since the nineties.

Right? So Natural Power has been going on a pretty long time based in Scotland, and you do you do some operation stuff as well, don't you and some asset management stuff? Do you wanna talk about that? Yeah.

So we have a surprisingly high-tech control center in the middle of nowhere in Scotland in Dunfries and Galloway where we look after a Probably about a quarter of the UK's onshore wind fleet plus some batteries at the moment. A lot of that is around managing the data flows, managing projects that operating the balancing mechanism, doing access and and egress management. Yeah. All the kind of day to day kind of data management and it's more and more also the sort of performance analysis and and reporting on operational sites in the UK.

And that's in the, I guess, we should probably put a link in the show notes, but there's like, teletubbies, hobbits, style buildings in the middle of nowhere where I guess there's some people who sit there with a lot of screens controlling and monitoring stuff. Right? Yeah. So we call it the greenhouse.

It's like global quarters in the middle of nowhere in Humphrey's Galloway with a green roof hence the name. Like I said, it is it's a really high-tech in there lots of screens or twenty fourseven operations. We, I think one of the only private controlled centers in the UK that has a direct line to national grids and it's literally sort of red phone type situation where they can call us if they need us to curtail wind farms because we manage just that much capacity through this control center. Yeah.

What what does that mean? So course of all the onshore wind in the UK, what what does that mean in numbers? How many wind turbines is that? Or how many megawatts, bigger watts is that?

Put it on the spot here. You're asking me there. Yeah. I I actually think it changes so much every year.

I'm not sure what the latest stat is on onshore wind capacity in the UK. But it's a lot. It's a lot. It's definitely more than batteries.

Although batteries are also obviously growing hugely, but yeah, there's a lot of wind around in the UK. It comes out there. There's so much there's so many wind people who are really digging a battery so being so much smaller. We're gonna I'm not I'm not gonna put you in that group, but that that was that was that was the first strike, Kenneth.

Alright. So, yeah, what else does natural powder? You guys do control center stuff. You look at wint you look at the wind turbines, look at the batteries, but your bit of the business you do some pretty high-techy consultancy stuff.

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

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

And the company says four hundred and fifty people, we're gonna talk about what you work on in a second, but there's four hundred and fifty people ish in the company, and you're in the UK, and your elsewhere too. Right? Yeah. So, majority of our staff are based in the UK.

We have another office in Dublin. So we've got maybe twenty people there. And then offices in France and in the US of East Coast, West Coast, Central's, yeah, growing all over, we've also got few people in the Nordics and Poland. So I'm trying to grow internationally, but our core markets are definitely kind of Western Europe and the US.

And who's a customer for the work that you guys do. Is it asset owners, or is it more banks and lenders, or is it developers? Who who works for? What's the range?

I mean, that's a power, you know, one of the things we like to say is that we support people across the whole life cycle of projects. So if we're looking at early stage development, our clients would be developers who need help figuring out if a project's feasible and what it might look like help even signing up land and actually talking to landowners help getting the planning consents or doing all the kind of environmental studies ecology. We've got people who go out in votes and count marine mammals for offshore wind farms which I personally am quite jealous of. I think in another life, that would be the top that I'd want.

It's either marine mammals or it's bats. Right? That's the two things you're gonna look for with your bugs or newts, newts, lots of any popular. What they call great great crested news.

You don't want that on your side. Yeah, the whole kind of planning and development support piece. And then we have a big construction team who would help with the kind of construction management of projects. So being the client's representative on-site, making sure contractors are doing what they're meant to do, keeping track of budget and time scales and actually just, yeah, running around with the hard hats and and high vis and making sure these these projects get bit.

And what are you able to to give some examples of the kind of customers that, you guys that, yeah, you you work with? Sure. Is it It's anything from primarily work on large scale front of the meter projects that can include utilities, and we've worked with Stock Craft with SSE, squash power, ESP, we work with more private developers for likes of, well, community wind power is one that has wind power in the name, but they've also started to do so non storage now.

At best managers or start about wins. So I've got we've got bill. We we did a podcast recording just before this one. And, yeah, I think I think I've got a bit of a chip on my shoulder today about wind.

But it's okay. It's okay. I'll take it all back. It's known as more storage play.

I think we we've worked with, like, SMS energy, on some of their battery projects.

Work Yeah. I think two now, right? Two two big ones. Two big ones. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm sure more coming down the pipeline. So, yeah, I know a lot of a lot of the work we do is because it's transaction related. It's somewhat confidential, but Yeah. No.

I understand. Okay. Let's get into the nuts and bolts here. Right? I wanna talk today about colocation because you guys are doing loads of work on colocation.

And it's a hot topic because I think probably that's about five years really colocation has been a word that we've we've bounced around a lot and still we're not getting the kind of assets built out yet. So there's a lot of sites that I've got planning for solar that's got rolling for a battery or battery that's got planning for solar. And still, we're only seeing one side of it get built out at the moment. Now, I'm interested to know why you think that is and what's changing in the future.

I probably have a very bit of a different perspective on that Oh. Because we have been working on a lot of these hybrid projects. And, absolutely, it's not. It's still a small fraction of the total pipeline, but there are definitely projects and they have been for years, projects that have been built out on a happily operating in that sort of hybrid basis.

I think I do have some stats here because I looked them up. At the moment of our ten percent of the UK's battery operation battery fleet is collocated and that's not lot that's less than two hundred megawatts. That's a small number. But if you look at the pipeline of development projects, I think it goes up to something like twenty percent of factories that are currently in the pipeline that will be planned to be collocated with other forms of technology. And that gigawatts scale then, twenty percent of the current pipeline is a lot.

So I know of the so I know the there's the SSC one, which is next to wind, and then there's the something farms. The the old Anesco one that's The ones that everyone knows about. In the ten. Right?

Yeah. The the ones that people know about is the Anesco one, which is called Clayhill. Heyhill. Yeah.

That was, I think, the first subsidy free solar farm. It would be would be. First co located Solarland storage project. So that made a lot of waves.

I think they had the politicians cutting the ribbon and all of that. It was a really cool landmark project. VanFile have done at least one in Wales where we actually had them do the planning consent. That's a site called penny can wait, I believe.

Penny C, we call it. Yeah. Yeah. You can't pronounce the phone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's quite a chunky battery for the time at least.

I think it's like a twenty megawatt actually there. Yeah. Collocated with a winter farm. And then there are others.

Solarland storage. You've got cleaver that's, you know, be coming into construction now. That made a lot of news for being the first what we call a DCO project, so LaFanda's so big it had to be consented under kind of a special national planning regime. And that has a sort of hundreds meg, what's the storage collocated?

And that So the storage is actually getting built on that. Sorry? Is this so they're gonna build they are actually gonna build the storage on as far as I know, and we actually supported Quinnbrook when they acquired that project, which was last year. And certainly in the conversation we had with them in the time the plan was to build out person together.

We need to put down our database then. Yeah, and there's the there's the unicos one that's next to high wind, isn't there? There's like a one megawatt one there. There's one good wind, which is the thing that Earth's dead born.

Yeah. Great name. We should do like a dingbats of this at Christmas or something like that. And then I think that's about it at the moment.

But how are there's two hundred megawatt out there.

We need to find these. No. I think you're right that the fact that we can rattle off a good number of them on one hand means that it is fairly new concept. And you're also right that by we see now, the majority of solar farms put into planning with provision, the battery storage, often that's just a little square on your layout drawing saying, and we might want to put storage here at some point with no intention to immediately build out but with keeping that in reserve for future if they want to add it, which in itself, I think, is meaningful and interesting because it means that these developers do see the market going that way, and they might fear, and I think this is a theme in the sort of legacy Renewable industry that have done, you know, generation development, wind and solar, no storages.

Like, they might not feel like they are ready or or have the knowledge than sellers develop about the battery, but they do see that it adds value. And if they might wanna sell the site at some point or once they have obscured more in that area, they could add batteries in future without going so your complicated kind of consenting process.

Yeah. Absolutely, it's setting a house for planning permission to put a bigger bathroom in. Right? You don't necessarily need to do it.

You just need to get a piece of paper. And, and then, yeah, who knows what happens? Alright. Sorry.

Sorry. Just the last point. Like I said, Andrew Powell, There's the hole behind the meter segment as well. Right?

And that is one that, you know, the UK has never been, I would say, the strongest market the residential than behind the mutual renewables and storage. It's not like Germany where this is, like, really taking off, but it is also growing here, and particularly the sort of commercial industrial segment where, you know, people are having to deal with really high energy costs and it's only gonna get worse. There's a huge incentive there to put behind the meter generation and storage So I was hearing that, apparently, if you wanna do I wanna ask you about German behind the meter now because you're German and you're an expert, so I'm gonna bring notice there's a Venn diagram here that's coming.

Watch it. Right? But There's someone told me that, apparently, now if you wanna put domestic soda in a battery on your house, you essentially have to pay someone over the phone before they even speak to you. Because there's such a demand to get these surveys done.

You have to pay a couple of hundred credit upfront just to get someone to come out to your house, come out to your house and even talk to you because so many people who wanna go off grid or wanna be self sufficient if you like. It's quite exciting, really. It's really I think we talk about our industry being a roller coaster, but that's exactly the same on the residential behind the meter side because you don't have the same subsidies of peden tariffs in the UK that you had a few years ago. So all the infrastructure and the installers were there and then really struggled when that support was cut because nobody was, you know, looking to do it anymore.

And I think now with energy prices going well, they're going and some other things that aren't like VAT, being applied or not applied. Yeah. That, I mean, that demand is absolutely growing again. So I'm not surprised to hear that, you know, you have to pay basically to get one to to look at your roof and tell you what you can fit there.

And what's the deal with was behind him. I saw a graph from, I think, it was Bloomberg new new energy finance, and it was it was a standard hockey stick graph of, like, battery storage stuff. But then it had a carve out for Germany and then it had a carve out for behind the meter. And behind the meter, it's just so much bigger in Germany than front of the meter.

And so much bigger in Germany than anywhere else in Europe. What's the what do you know what's caused that?

I think it's a combination and probably sort of said for petrating circle of cultural attitudes towards energy, and there's definitely a really strong, you know, green movement in Germany and and very much in the personal sphere of people wanting to become autonomous and reduce their own carbon footprint and being very open to to doing so long storage in that homes. The other thing is the the housing stock there is much newer than it is here. So houses and properties are way more it's easier and more efficient.

Do that kind of behind the meter generation and storage because you're you're well insulated. You tend to have a bit more space on a roof, just things like that, make it easier. My parents actually have put in solar and storage and actually also some solar thermal over the last few years. So I've been a current position of being used as a private consultant for my parent.

In a segment that is not really why do professionally. Very dangerous, mister. Absolute recipe for disaster. I thought what have they gone for?

They gone for a salmon. They gone for a test. They went and some of the companies actually from a village that is about half an hour from where I grew up in the middle of nowhere in the Bavarian Arts. So that that's Homegrown I don't know if it's farming or product positioning.

I don't know just something about the Sonum, but as a battery person, Sonum, the Sonum battery gets my heart racing. It's just they look so, so cool. Alright. Right then.

Next question. What on earth is an energy park? And what is everyone talking about them? Yeah.

Energy Park is one of these terms that sometimes gets thrown around, and I have a feeling that some governments and some local planning authority have really latched on to that. Think Wayers is a good example. There's loads of, goodwill and support an incentive in in Wayers from the kind of planning authorities to say you know, propose us an energy park. We don't just wanna wind farm.

We want an energy park. And there are good reasons for that. I'm free to just think about it practically. If you manage to stick a lot of infrastructure in the same site, you're containing the visual impact, the noise impact, the environmental impact into one area, So in a situation where, you know, particularly with wind, there can be a lot of opposition and concern on visual impact and noise.

Are typically the things that developers have to contend with and have to very carefully manage as they should have to do with the local community. I think there's a school of thought that says if you're gonna build a wind farm here anyway and have go through all of that. Why not add solar? Why not add storage?

Put it all in one place. It's all then gonna look more industrial, but at least it's gonna be in one spot. Think that's maybe the sort of planning argument and the other obvious argument is grid. And you talk to any developer pretty much anywhere in Europe these days.

They're all gonna have a moan about grid when grid is the thing that makes development really difficult. That's really expensive. As in connections. Yeah.

As in connecting, finding a connection that you can actually or your power as a generator or as a voucher you have access to both import and export. And that's because our grids were not built to have all this distributed intermittent renewable generation in some, particularly in the remoter parts of the country where the demand isn't so high, the grid is not set out to really take in huge amounts of power and capacity. So having access to grid is really, really valuable. And if you have one of those grid connections, I think developers increasingly like, how do I make the most of it?

And again, that's where the energy part concept comes in rather than just putting a solar farm onto this grid connection, where realistically you're gonna use that grid connection only during the day, and your No.

Yeah. It's so wide blown. But also even during the day, you're only gonna use kind of the maximum limit of the grid connection during the peak. During the boring bit.

Yeah. During yeah. During lunchtime if it's sunny. Yeah. And the rest of the day, you're actually seeing a lot of spare grid.

Not surprising that developers are thinking about how do I use that spare capacity?

You can combine wind and solar, you can combine solar and storage. People are now talking about combining hydrogen and and lots of other stuff as well. But yeah, it comes down to how do you make the most of your grid connection, also spread the cost that frankly is big part of your your construction cost is actually paying for that grid connection, spread it across multiple projects. And the word park just means colocation and big.

Is big part of it? Or is it just a trendy way to describe I think it probably the park might come more from the fact that people would just sometimes refer to the wind farm as a wind park. Wind park and power park. It was sort of leisure conversation with me.

And I mean, we have sides like, Scottish powers, one in Whitley, is it really, where it genuinely is a public recreation and leisure facility. They're cycling fast so you can walk around between the turbines and they're looking to add solar there. They're, you know, developing or building out an hour battery there. They're talking about hydrogens.

So It also maybe has that element of it's a park in the way that a public park can be a good thing for people to go and enjoy. Everyone's an energy there like us, but Yeah. I was gonna say, do you know how out of touch we are? Right?

Because I can't the the the idea of that sounds great. I really wanna go. And then we've got the news, got Liz Trust and whatever. And it's like the winner, whoever wins the conservative the conservative election, leadership election.

It sounds to be the one who's just the craziest thing about everything, including Solar now. Yeah. Maybe everybody doesn't want these parks to to go and have the picnic in with little wind turbines. I do anyway.

I'd vote for that. So big collocated things with the word park on it. And so you can either do window battery. You can do soda and battery.

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

Oh, okay. Big question. And I feel like whenever you start talking about hydrogen, you might end up having an argument because people have very different views on what I know nothing. Audibly would be useful.

So I'm gonna what is it gonna be used for a bit and probably talk more about why combine it with a traditional kind of renewable Yeah. Something for storage park. So hydrogen is great because it doesn't need a grid connection, right? Cause hydrogen is not electricity that you would want to put into the electricity grid.

It is gas and it's a good way of storing energy in gas form and then just do whatever you want with it. So that's what's driving the hydrogen space is the fact that batteries are great at short term storage, but they're not gonna be good at storing electricity for days, weeks, months, whereas we know we will need that, and we know we have a really uneven sort of pattern of seasonal demand and seasonal generation. So we need something ultimately sort that out. And that's So is the deal?

So is it like a battery that's bigger than pumped hydro? Is that the kind of sphere that we're in? We're like you got pumped hydro flow battery sorry. You've got lithium ion, then you've got flow batteries if if that materializes, which hopefully it does.

And then you've got bigger than that, which is like pumped hydro, the Norwiggie kind of stuff. And then is the hydrogen storage thing the bit beyond that longer duration? And when you say big, are you talking about like duration of storage or use You just call me out here. I'm just talking on this line.

I'm gonna go with duration. Okay. Yeah. I'm gonna go with duration. Yeah. Principal, you can store hydrogen indefinitely.

If you won't, it would be lost or be less efficient. It can literally just sit there in tanks. Now you don't wanna build because you wanna size your kind of storage capacity appropriately for when you're gonna use it. But yeah, in the sense of duration, it is unlimited.

And in terms of scale capacity, it is very scalable. You can have a one megawatt kind of electrolyzer plant or you could build hundreds gigawatts scale type project. It's very it's like batteries in the sense that it's sort of scalable and stackable. And so the the park, the energy park idea with hydrogen on it is This is a fully green solution.

Right? This is green renewable power coming in through an electrolyzer, turning that electricity into Well, no. That's not true. Doing the electricity powering a chemical reaction that that then creates high hydrogen.

And what, outputs hydrogen. And so is the idea of putting do do these hydrogen facilities take up a lot space, and that's why we wanna put them all together, or is it just is it an efficiency thing? Or, you know, what? How's the business case work?

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

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

And so there might be projects that, you know, can can export some of their power into the grid, but sometimes there'd be cut because the grid is too constrained or they don't actually have more generation capacity than they're allowed to export. So during a particular windy period or particularly sunny period, they have to they would have to reduce their output and basically just lose energy that they otherwise could make money with. So the idea with hydrogen is rather than just turn your wind turbine down or turn your solar farm down, you use that excess electricity to make the hydrogen and then it gives you another revenue stream. So ultimately, that would be the business case is sites that can't get access to the grid or that are curtailed use that electricity that otherwise would be wasted to produce hydrogen and then sell that hydrogen into various markets. This is the controversial topic that I mentioned earlier.

Get me started on that guy. Alright. No. I'm not gonna say anything too controversial here.

Can I still get a CFT on my offshore wind farm if I put the hydrogen electrolyzer next to it? Yeah. What's the deal there? Yeah.

The CFT, which is contracts for friend, so there's a main support regime for offshore wind, but also for onshore wind and solar still exists. What exists again? Is the voice theme that now allows for hybrid projects. So it's some form of renewable generation plus storage or even combinations of wind and solar.

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

And the regulator has, as I've said, that's fine. He's published guidance on how to to do that because what they understandably wanna avoid is paying subsidy on electricity that actually isn't renewable and the batteries just sucked up from the grid and and the pipes. Yeah. You just have double dip coming here.

But the UK is one of the markets where regulation does now allow that and it's it's actually quite advanced. In other markets, like Ireland, it's a lot more challenging still. So hybrid projects in Ireland. Once that we worked on, that were one of the first solar storage hybrids.

They're literally just they're next to each other, but they have separate grid connections. Everything is separated. They just share the site. So there's really not much the use of system charges Yeah.

Ouch. Their own grid infrastructure. So there's really very little commercial benefit. You probably can operate them, maintain them together.

You might get a bit of a cost saving there. But yeah, it really shows you how much of a row regulation it has to play in supporting and enabling these kind of hybrids. And annoyingly regulation always lags behind the technology, really, and and the innovation in the development side a little bit. And where are these big power parks and the park's gonna be.

Yeah. Are they gonna be in the middle of nowhere? Are they gonna be on a coast next to wind? Are they gonna be, yeah, seaside?

Everything's in seaside, these sets. That's just throw a lot of place up in here, and Teside will land face up for any sort of investment. It's like also, yeah, coast and communities are really seeing some benefit from this, which is Absolutely. Looking at the UK and looking at the amount of offshore wind that will be built out in the government is very much betting on offshore wind to be the backbone of the UK's electricity system.

There will absolutely be lots of times over the next few years where there's too much wind and we need to do something with it. So it's logical that a lot of the sort of storage, particularly green hydrogen infrastructure will be located at the point where those offshore wind funds are coming online. My personal opinion is that probably we'll have the sort of onshore that the hydrogen generation stuff would be located onshore rather than offshore with the turbines, although there are also some really cool concepts about having, you know, offshore hydrogen production with electrolyzers located in the turbines was on a platform offshore.

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

Yeah. Where to even yeah.

I'm gonna shake my head, but not say anything out loud about it. I just don't understand. I don't just servicing anything offshore is so expensive and complicated. I don't know why you'd put anything else off.

Just just put it on land. That being said, again, coming back to the kind of planning side and impact on communities, there's already a lot of, you know, challenges and pushback with all these grid coming on shore. That still has an impact. Yeah.

I think putting even more industrial infrastructure there could be challenging. But again, we have the ports. We have loads of refineries and and industrial facilities that already use hydrogen, but they use the kind of fossil fuel type of hydrogen, which is often called, you know, gray hydrogen or black hydrogen.

For them, it's quite easy to switch over to using green hydrogen that's been made from wind power. So it makes sense that a lot of the the industry would be concentrated on there. But then down the line, like I said earlier, it's the remote areas that have difficulties with access to grid. We might well see wind plus hydrogen somewhere in Wales or somewhere in London where you might not have the hydrogen offtake directly there, but then you'll have to figure out a way to to transport it. Then you gotta move it.

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

But there's a big there's a supply chain issue with some issues with electrification in supply chain in planning in infrastructure. I get it. I just feel like come the year twenty one hundred. Someone somewhere is gonna be saying, alright.

Okay. Maybe we should have just electrified rather than skip the hydrogen a bit. Yeah. And I completely agree with you.

I'm very much in the school of electrify what we can. That's gonna be the cheapest and fastest, the best way of doing it, and speed does matter here. We're all, like, under a net zero by two thousand and fifty kind of goes. There are absolutely sectors that you can't electrify.

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

Right? Hundred percent. Yeah. And electricity isn't gonna do anything there. So it's, yeah, it's about finding the right uses for it, and There are some that are in the middle, whereas it's the whole heat pump versus hydrogen boiler debate.

Yeah. And I I personally void more on education side of that. Speaking to some of our Scandinavian customers, and they can't believe that there's even discussion. Oh, firstly, they can't believe that, yeah, that we use gas for domestic heat for stop.

And secondly, there's even discussion about using hydrogen rather than putting heat pumps in, but I want a heat pump. I don't have one. I really want a heat pump in my house. But one day maybe Santa will bring one for me.

Okay. Can we talk for a second about? Because you are a proper wind expert, and we don't have that many wind people on the podcast. Could you just talk briefly about what's going on in in wind, particularly onshore?

Because offshore gets a lot of coverage. Right? You've got the big CFT rounds. Oh, actually, onshore winds now CFT two, but the the mega projects are off offshore.

But what's going on onshore in in the wind world Probably people are happier than they have been in the last few years onshore. Onshore was very much in the UK. I think this sort of ugly stepchild or whatever you wanna call it. It went politically there was a lot of opposition.

Port was his draw and it's very challenging for onshore wind developers. And that probably benefited so land storage, frankly, because a lot of people pivoted into developing that. But yeah, onshore wind is seeing a little bit of a renaissance in the UK because there is, let's see if they support again and also the price point, frankly, of onshore windows reached a point now where you can definitely do these projects on a subsidy free basis through corporate PPA. So utility PPA's, and that's very kind of standard now.

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

So with wind turbines, you wanna get high up to access the higher wind speeds, the higher you are above the ground, the windier is. As if you go on the roof of building, you'll notice. So you wanna build these things high. I can see we've got sideways rain hitting this window right now.

So there's proof or audible proof. A lot wind out there. Yeah. So you wanna build them to it, but obviously the taller AI that the you can see them from further around and then from planning this effect if it gets more challenging, it was actually getting to a point where the onshore wind sector that actually turbine manufacturers have moved on and they're building bigger turbines now because most markets in the world are allowing these big turbines to be installed.

It actually became a bit difficult in the UK to still source turbines that look stubby enough to fit within our No. Permitted tip high envelope. Yeah. Cause it's legacy models in some cases that that people have to use.

What are those numbers here? So what's a normal tip height. So that's like the swim height. Is it of the Yeah.

So you're looking at the top of the tower and then, like, the blade above that, that would be your tip height. As what's a normal number for onshore wind in UK? And then how big do they go offshore? What's the the difference?

We normally talk about our supervisor. Capacity of turbines, and that's very much correlated to the size of the blades. And therefore, the bigger the blades is the taller the tower has to be so you don't hit the bottom. Yeah.

So offshore people are easily building twelve megawatt turbines now. I would say that the big boom in UK onshore winds, people were putting out two, three megawatt turbines. So way smaller. And now the current generation of onshore turbines that's being built is probably around six megawatts, and that's what's going up in the Nordics, where you can have these really tall tip heights In the UK, I would say the goal for developers is to get to like two hundred and twenty meters.

If you can get that, then that's pretty good, and then you can fit in a and size turbine, but it's not gonna be possible on every site. And it is difficult, you know, because the planning process with wind takes so long, compared to batteries or even compared to solar What is it? What it, I'm really interested in that. Why does it take longer?

And what's what's the time difference?

So, actually, you'd be able to consent, like, easily within a year. Right? Yeah. With a wind farm, you have to, you know, find your side.

You have to do lots of studies. A lot of the time, you have to do bird and and mammal surveys that last over the relevant season. So at least a year of just survey time. And then often, they go through an appeals process.

It goes back and forth, so you might end up with certainly yeah, two to four years, I would say, and it can't even be longer than that. So to get wind farm consented, and because the technology is moving on, what you're what developers have to do is put in a sort of guess of what what kind of turbines are gonna put on there based on where they think the market will be. And if it takes longer to consent the project, they might have a consented wind farm, but then they're Oh, no. It doesn't make sense to put those turbines in anymore.

I wanna put in a bigger tub. I don't have to go back and seek a variation to my consent and redo a lot of my studies because I'm now dealing with taller turbines. So it can't really be a long drawn out process. And to be honest, off shore, off shore is even longer.

But, yeah, onshore is not free from those problems, and that's gonna be pretty sad that the Nordics are installing gigawatts, size onshore wind. And we've got some lovely, onshore wind areas. And we're just not doing it because I guess people don't wanna look at them.

And that okay. I should emphasize that there's been lots of surveys done that actually public support for Onshore Wind is really strong. The majority of people want more onshore wind and like onshore wind and say they would be happy to live near an onshore wind farm. However, there is, you know, quite a strong sort of organized anti lobby, and I also think as not so above this, when something gets proposed in your back garden, you probably do think about it a little bit differently.

So yeah, that element of public opposition is one. But again, it's not all doom and gloom. We're working on a wind farm right now that is that's coming into construction, that's two hundred megawatts. That's a big project.

Only these wind farms have a a capacity factor, which is like a measure of how much electricity they produce compared to their sort of theoretical maximum of forty percent onshore. And that's because the UK wind resource is really good. It's not as good in the Nordics, which is also why they have to go higher in the Nordics. It's is windy there.

Take that nordic. Yeah.

Totally rosy over that. Yeah. So two hundred so two hundred megawatt wind farm, on a short wind farm in the UK. So that will do on average forty percent of that. Right? So it will do on average the eighty megawatts ish across twenty four hours or across a year.

Okay. Cool. Because we had Ross on talking about solar recently, yeah, and and capacity factors because there's two numbers. Right?

There's someone's got a gigawatt portfolio of renewables, but it only does x. And so, it's it's important to understand the differences. Well, for me to understand anyway. Because the solar fund capacity factor is what, like, ten plus.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So So when you got a gig on solar portfolios, you do, but Yeah.

No. No disrespect to the solar people out there. Alright. I wanna talk about batteries because that's what we love above all else, of course.

And you guys are doing quite work on on energy storage across technical advisory and now asset management and monitoring and some other data research on you. So What's going on in the projects that you're seeing and working on? I think that's been really cool in the UK in the last year or so. It's just that the scale of individual projects has exploded.

And we're seeing lots of projects coming forward that like five hundred megawatts of storage in one spot or even bigger than that. And then we're also seeing longer duration so maybe two hours, a gigawatt hour of storage in one spot. And compared to this one was currently on the system. Typically, you're minimum sort of fifty megawatts of of storage.

That's a huge difference. It's still big, guys. This is Yeah. Not denying that. Again, when we come and say as a planning consultant, helping our clients get consent for these projects, that does make a difference because it turns from a couple of shipping containers to this is now quite a big area with, you know, lots of containers or lots of enclosures or some sort of warehouse solution.

And whereas in the past it was very much storage will get consented, no, but you could possibly object to this. Once you talk about these bigger schemes, you probably do have to do a bit more work as a developer to demonstrate and analyze the impacts and make sure that it's all, you know, as it should be. So the scaling has been really cool, I think, and also technically really interesting. Because you do see people proposing concepts like warehouse systems that are sitting inside a building or double stacked storage, which are essentially as intense as we could look at that and we're like, Yeah.

It's it's maybe not the best. Please do tell. Fire safety is is really important. And I think it's only taken what one major incident of a fire and on a UK battery project for planning authorities and the public to get way more concerned about this and frankly, I think industry in the UK wasn't taking it seriously enough and and wasn't really knowledgeable enough about this stuff.

And as people are developing these bigger schemes, they're having to deal with this, they're having to grapple with their insurance people who are putting in pretty strict requirements and asking lots of uncomfortable questions. So that that's been fun even though it's a very serious topic, but it's been fun meeting with developers. Yeah. And I think that the US market is definitely leading the way on this, and that's where a lot of the the standards and the best practice guidelines on fire safety are coming from.

So we've in Artopower really benefited from having a US business that's been doing storage for just as long as we have an seen all of this and yet probably have a bit more lessons learned and a bit more here's genuinely what what makes a difference and what matters that we can bring to the UK market Yeah. Even I remember when you built the EFR battery, they got the one that they got. What's it called? It's next to the power station.

Alex is gonna kill me for forgetting And it's got massive blast walls between them. And when when they built that and we saw photos back when I was at Centrica, I was like, oh, this is these guys doing properly. Mhmm. Central also to build a beautiful batch in a building with completely over engineered fire and safety stuff because they were to be completely sure it was gonna be that they could manage that risk.

And then everybody else is just putting containers in fields. So Yeah. And then shoving them right next to each other and hoping for the best and really not thinking at all about the risk of fire propagation, and also the risk of a plus responders having to deal with it. That's the thing.

I think That said, I think separation I think air separations and this you'll be closer to the technical detail, but I've got I think the school of thought at the moment is blastoise unnecessary and air suitable s operation is enough for container systems? Yeah. No. You don't you don't need glassboards.

If you leave enough space and if you think about your venting Yeah. You wanna vent of what's ideally not. Yeah. Not citrus.

Yeah. And also access to the containers. We were moving away from a system where it's like a shipping container where someone has to open the door walk inside to to get to anything, but being able to access the batteries from the outside is way safer. Yeah.

Absolutely. And so what else are you guys working on? And what what are you seeing as trends? So bigger systems, we talked about half hour batteries, which just blows my mind.

I can't wait to I wanna go to I wanna go and walk around one of those sites in the building. It's gonna look very boring. Yeah. It will, wouldn't it?

I'm still gonna get excited about it. And what are the trends or or things are you seeing out there in the battery space? I think you're you guys are the experts. It's, right, that it's evolving revenue stack.

All the time, we're talking to developers and investors and asset owners who've come from the renewables world who are used to my electricity and I get money for it. And they really struggle with the complex and slightly unpredictable and ever changing revenue stack that is battery storage. So while every year we see a few more kind of clients of ours make that leap and be like, okay, we'd be like, we get it now. We can invest in this.

We've convinced our board. We've convinced our shareholders to to invest in storage. It's always you still have to have that conversation. Yeah.

It's mad. It's I I wanna do the digging back now at the wind and soda industry, but Win and Sodo has been so used to availability. Like, the the way you operate effectively is making things available. And available is just it doesn't cut it in a virtual world.

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

Everything is becoming an optimization problem. In a world of limited resources, you've really got me going on about this stuff now. No. But you're right.

That's exactly what's happening. And even the developers who are not looking at developing batteries who are just doing so long wind. They have to deal with this because they know that in the future, merchant word, it's not enough to just be like, I'm gonna dump my megawatt hours the grid whenever it's sunny or whenever it's windy. You will have to manage that much at risk because we will be in a world and we're already starting to see these periods where If it's very windy in the UK, our prices, our wholesale prices drop, then even go negative.

So if you're someone who's exposed to that wholesale price and you're just dumping your power onto the grid, That's not a way to operate a wind farm. You will have to manage that risk in collocating, bringing it back to the hybrid point, collocating with some form of storage. Is a really good way of managing that. Yeah.

You're leaving you're leaving a ton of money on the table. How about asset management?

What's happening there? Because I know Natural Power won some contracts recently. I don't know whether you're allowed to talk about it, but you won some contracts to to do asset management on behalf of asset owners to look at all those batteries and make sure that they are running efficiently and effectively. And I guess until recently, that wasn't really a problem.

Right? In wind, you have to do a lot of operations and maintenance for batteries you didn't have to do much. And now suddenly, as I said, suddenly, gradually, not suddenly the opposite of, suddenly. The industry is way is is realizing that these things need to be looked after.

And some of the big asset owners, you know, the big funds have done this from for a long time, but a lot of the newer players are it it I think it's I I I think it's a surprise, so it can be a bit of a surprise.

Do I say that diplomatically enough? I don't really think it's Please. I didn't mean to offend anyone, but essentially asset management is important, Hannah. Why? Oh, I do sound a bit aggressive there. No.

I guess taking it back to to maybe some of the differences between conventional and renewal generation and storage, where you're right. But wind farm solar farm, you have to send people out there in a van to to maintain them to fix stuff at the swap out parts. You do have to do that with batteries as well, but it's less of a day to day activity. The other thing is with wind and solar, you normally get a really lovely, fully wrapped operations maintenance contract, where some party will do absolutely everything for you.

They will manage the warranty for you. They will do all the maintenance, the scheduled maintenance, and, like, responding files. They would monitor the system around the clock. They will write your reports.

It's all packaging. It'll give you the performance and availability warranty. It's all in one piece. Whereas with batteries, I think there's maybe less standardization just yet, and we see more that your, you know, your OEMs are taking on some of that, but then there might also be another party that does the more sort of low tech maintenance.

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

And then it's like you said, it's the sort of data and performance side of it. So what is the battery doing is your optimizer doing a good job, and so that's why companies like Motohealth because they allow you to see what your asset is doing compared to other assets. That's a huge thing actually that we don't have in the wind and solar world necessarily is being able to see publicly how your asset is performing compared to others. Because there isn't that same, like, public. Watch this place.

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

Oh, it's just I was just just waiting for that one. Alright. I think we've had that time. What else would we do you wanna plug anything?

Is there anything you're working on that everyone should know about? This is the chance to get your message out there. So is there anything else you wanna add? Also no is an acceptable answer.

Oh, no. I do wanna obviously plug star. So and we've talked about hybrids. I genuinely I am weirdly passionate about hybrid projects.

I think it makes so much sense, and I'm really excited by how much the industry is really starting to seriously grapple with that and really thinking about what's the best for their projects in a way that's what's best for their children. How can we find the right combinations of stuff? And I think that that's something we Nashville have a lot of experience in helping people figure out. How much of the different technologies do you put together?

How is it all gonna work? Practically, but also from a revenue and optimization side. So, yeah, if anyone who's listening is getting their head around that at the moment, Please do get in touch. I will put a link in the show notes.

And that's it. I wanna say, Hannah, that that was a great conversation and for pulling me up on all the things, all the nonsense that I talk about. I wanna say to anyone who's listening, please do hit subscribe. It really does mean the world to us and, let us know what you think in comments. Until next time. Thanks very much.