Improving Europe's renewable infrastructure - Modo: The Podcast (ep. 29: Natural Power)

[Music] hello Hannah thanks for coming on the podcast um if anyone's listening again this is another one we've um we've been asking I've been one of those people asking for rain for weeks like oh please rain please rain I know it has and it's really really loud outside so um yeah we're gonna do this with a backdrop of some relaxing raindrop noises we've got Hannah starbon from natural power um Hannah thanks for coming on thanks for having me um and today we're going to talk about all sorts of stuff um wind and solar Parks or hybrid Parks Parks is the new word um and what you do at natural power and generally what's going on in collocated batteries so um Hannah do you want to just introduce yourself what do you do where do you come from and um yeah how do we know each other um hi the rain is great I'm also also that is my trainers yeah but yeah I um 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 you know what's new for the UK Market I have been in the renewable industry for about 10 years I started out working for a developer and then I've been working at nature power for the last five years so natural power is a technical and Engineering consultancy we work exclusively on renewable energy and and clean storage projects we are originally from Scotland although I'm based in London and we're about 450 people worldwide so focused on the kind of UK European and U.S markets and natural power is it only works on natural power stuff right so it's only Renewables and clean stuff the name is the giveaway yeah work on gas speakers for example that's that's not natural is there another consultancy that can say that it's another one that's that's so I'm sure there are but everose that they only do yeah K2 I think Maybe option wind energy yeah um so there are others it's pretty strong it's pretty strong and you know I think we've definitely seen a consolidation in consultancies in the market where you know others have been sort of absorbed by bigger companies who also work on wider infrastructure and energy projects so we're very proud of so being independent and also purely having that renewable Net Zero transition Focus oh yeah uh props and you guys have been doing it since the 90s right so naturopath has been going on a pretty long time based in Scotland and you do um you do some operational stuff as well don't you and some Asset Management stuff do you want to talk about that yeah so we have a surprisingly high-tech control center in the middle of nowhere in Scotland in Dumfries and Galloway where we look after a uh probably about a quarter of the UK's onshore wind Fleet plus some batteries at the moment so a lot of that is around sort of managing the data flows it's managing projects are operating on the balancing mechanism doing kind of access and eqs management so yeah all the kind of day-to-day kind of data management and you know more and more also the sort of performance analysis 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 a Teletubbies Hobbit style um building so in the middle of nowhere where I guess there's some people who sit there with a lot of screens controlling and monitoring stuff right yeah yeah so we call it the greenhouse it's uh it's a global headquarters in the middle of nowhere in Dumfries Galloway um with a green sort of roof hence the name um and like I said it is it's really high tech in that um lots of screens of 24 7 operations we I think one of the only private control centers in the UK that has a direct line to National Grid and it's literally a sort of red Phone type situation where they can call us if they need us took a Tailwind funds because we manage just that much capacity through this control center what does that mean so a 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 gigawatts is that when you're on the spot you're asking me there yeah I I actually because it changes so much every year I'm not sure what the latest stat is on 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 here comes out yeah there's so much there's so many wind people who are constantly digging your batteries for being so much smaller we've got a um I'm not going to put you in that in that group but that was that was that was the first strike at it all right so um yeah what else does natural power do you guys do control center stuff you look at when you look after wind turbines look after batteries but your bit of the business you do um some pretty high-tech e-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 you know fund these projects and make them happen and we sort of act as the independent technical expert that looks at the projects or the portfolios or the platforms whatever's being transactioned upon and tell them where the risks are and how they can mitigate them so it's all about figuring out you know are these viable projects are they in line with industry best practice if there are issues which inevitably every project you know 97 of projects but pretty much every project has issues you know how do you mitigate those how can you get around them how can you bake in contingencies or you know work out a way to resolve them to make sure you still have a viable project and the company says 450 people we're going to talk about what you work on in a second but there's 450 people ish in the company and um you're in the UK and you're elsewhere too right yeah so majority of our staff are based in the UK we have um another office in Dublin so we've got maybe 20 people there and then offices in France um and in the US of East Coast West Coast and Central so yeah kind of growing all over we've also got a few people in the nordics and Poland so kind of trying to trying to grow internationally but our core markets are definitely kind of Western Europe and the US and and who's the customer for the work that you guys do is it us owners or is it more you know Banks and lenders or is it developers we're actually across the range I mean not to power you know one of the things we like to say is that we support people across lifecycle a project so if we're looking at you know early stage development our clients would be developers who need help figuring out the Project's feasible and what it might look like help even signing up land and actually talking to landowners help getting the planning consent or doing all the kind of Environmental Studies ecology you know we've got people who go out in boats and count Marine mammas for offshore wind farms which I personally am quite jealous of I think in another life that would be the job that I'd want so it's either so it's either marine mammals or it's bats right that's the two things you'll look forward great great questions you don't want that on your side um so 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 or project 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 the heart hat and highways and making sure these these projects get built and what are you able to give some examples of the kind of customers that uh you guys that yeah you work with sure is it yeah I mean is anything from you know primarily work on some large scale front of the meter project so um that can include utilities you know we've worked with stackcraft with SSE squash power ESB we work with some more private developers um the likes of Well Community wind power is one that has wind power in the name but they've also started to do solar storage now we did a podcast recording just before this one and uh yeah I think I think I've got a bit of a chip much shorter today about wind but it's okay it's okay I'll take it all back well it's name some more storage players you know we've worked with like SMS energy um on some of our battery projects uh we've got a question yeah they got two now right two two big ones two big ones yeah and more I'm sure more coming down the pipeline um so yeah I know a lot of a lot of the work we do is kind of because it's transaction related it's it's Adventure but um yeah no answer okay let's go let's get into the nuts and bolts for it right so um I want to talk today about co-location because you guys are doing loads of work on collocation and it's a Hot Topic because um I think probably that's well about five years really collocation has been a word that we've bounced around a lot and still we're not getting the kind of um assets built out yet so there's a lot of sites I've got planning for you know solar that's got rolling for a battery or battery's got planning for a solar and still we're only seeing one side of it get built out at the moment and I'll um I'm interested to know why you think that is and what's changing in the future have a very bit of a difference effective on that because we have been working on a lot of these hybrid projects and absolutely it's not you know it's still a small fraction of the total pipeline but there are definitely projects and there have been for years projects that have been built out and are happily operating in that sort of hybrid basis I think I do have some stats here because I look them up at the moment about 10 of the UK's battery operation battery Fleet is co-located and that's not a lot I mean that's less than 200 megawatts that's a small number but if you look at the pipeline of development projects I think it goes up to something like 20 of batteries that are currently in the pipeline that will be planned to be collocated with other forms of technology and that's like gigawatt scale then if 20 of the current pipeline is a lot so I know of the so I know the there's the SSE one which is next to wind and then there's the um something Farm the the jordanesco one the ones that everyone knows right yeah the ones that people know about is um the UNESCO one which is called Clay Hill yeah that was I think the first subsidy free solar farm we've been the first co-located solar storage project so that made a lot of waves I think they had like politicians you know cutting the ribbon and all of that it was a really you know cool llama project that and file have done at least one in Wales where we actually helped them do the planning concern that's a site called Penny Kim void I believe Penny C we call it yeah yeah you can't pronounce it yeah yeah yeah and that's quite a chunky battery I mean for the time at least I think it's like a 20 megawatt battery there yeah located with a wind farm and then you know there are others solo and storage you know you've got Clipper that's you know going to be coming into construction now that made a lot of news for being the first um what we call a dco project so solar farm is so big it had to be consented under kind of a special National planning regime and that has a sort of hundreds of megawatts of storage co-located and so I'm sure it's actually getting built on that sorry is this silicon adult they are actually going to build the storage on that as far as I know I mean we actually supported Quinn Brook when they acquired that project um which was last year and certainly with the conversation we have with them and the time the plan was to build out both together we need to put that on a database then yeah and there's the um there's the unicos one that's next to the high wind isn't there there's like a one megawatts there's one called batwind which is I think the Earth we should do like a ding bat so this at Christmas and then uh I think that's about it at the moment but how about there's 200 megawatts out there we need to find these now I think you're right that you know the fact that we can you know rattle off a good number of them sort of on one hand means that it is it is still a fairly New Concept um and you're also right that while we see now the majority of solar Farms put into planning with provision for battery storage often that's just a little square on your layout drawing saying and we might want to put storage here at some point with no intention to immediately build it out but with sort of keeping that in reserve for future if they wanted to add it which in itself I think is 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 generation development wind and solar no storage it's like they might not feel like they are ready or have the knowledge to themselves develop out the battery but they do see that it adds value and if they might want to sell the site at some point or once they have kind of upskilled more in that area they could add batteries in future without going through your complicated kind of consenting process yeah absolutely it's like um selling a house with planning permission to put a bigger bathroom in right you don't necessarily need to do it you just need to do a piece of paper that says you can and then yeah who knows what happens all right I'm sorry just the last Point um you know like I said don't cut me off no um there's a hoe 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 for residential and behind the mutual Renewables and storage so it's not like Germany where this is like really taking off but um 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 going to get worse I mean there's a huge incentive there to put behind the meter generation and storage so I was hearing that apparently if you want to do um I want to ask you about German behind the meter now because you're German and you're an expert so I'm going to bring those there's a there's a Venn diagram here that's coming what's this say but there's um someone told me that apparently now if you want to put domestic solo and a battery on your house you essentially have to pay someone over the phone before they'll even speak to you because there's such a demand to get these surveys done you have to pay a couple hundred quid up front just to get someone to come out to come out to your house and even talk to you because there's so many people who want to go off grid or want to be self-sufficient if you like it's quite exciting really it's really you know I think we talk about our industry being a roller coaster but that's exactly the same on the the residents behind the meter side because you know you don't have the same subsidies as Pete and tariffs in the UK that you had a few years ago so kind of 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 some are on like the at um being applied or not applied yeah I mean that that demand is absolutely growing again so I'm not surprised to hear that you know you have to pay basically to get someone to look at your roof and tell you what you can fit there and what's the deal with what's going on with behind them I saw a graph from I think it's Bloomberg new energy finance and it was uh it was a standard hockey stick graph of like uh 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 is just so so much bigger in Germany than in front of the meter and so much bigger in Germany than anywhere else in Europe what's the what do you know what to cause that I think it's a combination and probably a sort of self-perpetuating Circle of cultural attitudes towards energy um 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 more autonomous and reduce their own carbon footprint and being very open to doing solo and storage in their homes the other thing is the housing stock there is much newer than it is here so houses and properties are way more you know it's easier and more efficient to do that kind of behind the meter generation and storage because you're you know you're well insulated you tend to have a bit more space on a roof just things like that um make it easier my parents actually have put in Solo and storage and actually also some solar farmer over the last year so I've it's been a terrible position of being used as a private consultant for my parent in a segment that is not really what I do professionally very dangerous absolute recipe for disaster but what are they gone for they've gone for a Sonnen they go for a test yeah they actually they went for a solid system and Southern the company is actually from a village that is about half an hour from where I grew up in the middle of nowhere in the Bavarian Alps so that that's a kind of homegrown you know gets my heart racing it's just they look so so cool all right um right then next question what on Earth is an energy Park and what is everyone talking about them yeah um 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 really latched onto that um everything Wales is a good example there's loads of um Goodwill and support and incentive in Wales from the kind of planning authorities to say you know proposes an energy Park we don't just want a wind farm we want an energy Park and you know there are good reasons for that I mean if you just think about it practically um if you manage to stick a lot of infrastructure in the same site you're kind of containing the visual impact the noise impact the environmental impact into one area so in a situation where 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 you know as they should have to do with with the local community um I think there's a school of thought that says well if you're going to build a wind farm here anyway and have to go through all of that why not add solar why not add storage put it all in one place it's all then going to look more industrial but at least it's going to be in one spot so I think that's maybe the sort of planning argument and the other obvious argument is great and you know you talk to any developer pretty much anywhere in Europe these days they're all going to have a moan about grid and grid is the thing that makes development really difficult it's really expensive as in connections yeah then connecting you know finding a connection that you can actually export your power as a generator or as a battery have access to both Import and Export and that's because you know our grids were not built to have well this distributed intimately renewable generation so um in some you know particularly in the remote parts of the country where the demand isn't so high the grid is not you know 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 good connections I think developers increasingly like well 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 going to use that grid connection only during the day and you're not only did it yeah but also you know even during the day you're only going to use kind of the maximum limit of the grid connection during the peak sort of join a boring bit Yeah during yeah during lunch time if it's sunny yeah um and the rest of the day you're actually sitting on a lot of spare grid so not surprising that developers are thinking about well how do I use that spare capacity and you know you can combine wind and solar you can combine solar and storage people are now talking about combining you know hydrogen and lots of other stuff as well but yeah it comes down to how do you make the most of your good connection also spread the cost that frankly is a big part of your your construction cost is actually paying for that good connection spread it across multiple projects and so um the word Park just means um co-location and big uh is big part of it or is it just is it just a trendy way to describe I I think Park might come more from the fact that people you know also will support um it has a bit of sort of leisure connotation doesn't it I mean you do have sites like um Scottish Powers worn in Whiteley is a really good example where it genuinely is a public Recreation and Leisure facility there's cycling path so you can like walk around between the turbines and they're looking to add solar there they're you know developing or building out now a battery there they're talking about hydrogen so it also maybe has that element of you know it's a park in the way that you know a public park can be a good thing for people to go and enjoy oh not everyone's energy they're like us but yeah I was gonna say do you know how out of touch we are right because I can't the the idea of that sounds great I really want to go and then we've got like in the news got Liz trust and whatever and like the winner of whoever wins the conservative conservative election leadership election it sounds to be the one who's just the craziest thing about everything including solar now uh yeah maybe maybe everybody doesn't want these parks to go and have the picnic in with load of wind turbines I do anyway I'd vote for that so um big collocated things with the word park on it um and so you can either do window battery you can do certain battery you can do wind solar and battery and get a full house or now you can also do hydrogen so what's that what's the hydrogen gig all about on a energy Park oh okay big question um 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 exactly ultimately would be useful so I'm going to park though what is it going to be useful for Brett and probably talk more about why you 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 because hydrogen is not electricity that you would want to put into the electricity grid it is gas and it's a good way of storing energy in gas form and then do whatever you want with it so that's kind of what's driving the hydrogen space is the fact that batteries are great at short-term storage but they're not going to be good at storing electricity for days weeks months whereas we know we will need that we know we have a really um uneven sort of pattern of seasonal demand and seasonal generation so we need something ultimately to sort that out and that's where's 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've 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 norwegy 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 straw like duration of storage or YouTube just call me out here I'm just talking nonsense right um I'm going to go with duration okay yeah I'm gonna go with duration um yeah I mean in principle you can sort of store hydrogen indefinitely you know you won't it won't kind of be lost or be less efficient it can literally just sit there in tanks now you know you don't want to build obviously you want to size your kind of storage capacity appropriately for when you're going to use it but yeah um in in the sense of duration it is kind of unlimited and in terms of scale capacity it is very scalable you know you can you can have a one megawatt kind of electrolyzer plant or you could build you know hundreds gigawatt scale type projects it's very it's like batteries in the sense that it's sort of scalable and stackable and so the the the power card 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 uh that electricity into well no that's not true electricity powering a chemical reaction that they create hydrogen um and what outputs hydrogen and so is the idea of putting do these hydrogen facilities take up a lot of space and that's why we want to put them all together or is it just um is it an efficiency thing or you know what how does how does the business case work yeah there's two kind of arguments for putting that electrolytes the hydrogen infrastructure next to your renewable generation one is you then don't have to transport the electricity you know 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 you know we talked about access to grid being scarce and so there might be projects that you know can can export some of their power into the grid but sometimes they'll be curtailed because the grid is too constrained or they don't they actually have more generation capacity than they're allowed to export so during a particular windy period or particularly Sunny period they kind of have to they would have to kind of 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 it'll 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 that would be the business case is sites that can't get access to the Grid or the Alcatel 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 um all right so um no I'm not going to say anything too controversial here so uh can I still get a cfd on my offshore Wind Farm if I put a hydrogen electrolyzer next to it um yeah what's the deal there yeah so um the cfd which is contracts were different so there's a main support regime for offshore wind but also for onshore wind and solar still exists what exists again um in the support scheme that now allows for hybrid projects um so it's a form of renewal generation Plus Storage or even combinations of wind and solar you could technically I think apply for a cfd now in this last round that happened earlier this year I don't believe there were any hybrid project that participated as such I mean Cleve Hill which is a solar storage hybrid did participate but it sort of put in a chunk of their solar capacity um sort of on a standalone basis and basically as long as you can keep track of the energy flows within your project like what's coming out of your solar farm and going into the battery and then going into the grid versus what might the battery take out of the grid and then put back in as long as you can split that out it's fine you know and the regulator has as I've said that's fine has published guidance on how to to do that because what they understandably want to avoid is paying subsidy on electricity that actually isn't renewable and the batteries just sucked up from the creator of double dip can't you yeah yeah but um the UK is you know one of the markets where regulation does now allow that and it's actually quite advanced in other markets like Ireland it's a lot more challenging still so hybrid projects in Ireland you know the ones that we worked on that were kind of 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 like the site so so there's really very little commercial benefit you probably you know 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 road regulation has to play in supporting and enabling these kind of hybrids and annoyingly regulation always kind of lags behind the technology really and The Innovation and the development side a little bit and where are these big um Power Parks you know energy Parts gonna be yeah um are they going to be in the middle of nowhere are they going to be on a coast next to wind are they going to be yeah um t-side everything's in t-sides these days it's like uh just throw it out of place up in here and teaside will land face up for any sort of investment although yeah Coastal Community great so I've been in the UK and looking at the amount of offshore wind that will be built out I mean 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 so my personal opinion is that probably we'll have the sort of onshore the hydrogen Generation stuff would be located on Shore rather than offshore with the turbines although there are also some really cool Concepts about having you know offshore hydrogen production with electrolytesers located in the turbines or sort of on a platform offshore um we will see you know I might be wrong about this but I'm like that seems more complicated yeah where to even yeah I'm gonna shake my head but not say anything out out loud 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 just put it on land that being said I mean 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 connections coming on sure you know that that still has an impact and to think like putting even more industrial infrastructure there could be challenging but again you know we have the ports we have you know loads of refineries and you know 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 so for them it's quite easy to switch over to using green hydrogen that's been made from wind power so it makes sense that a lot of the the industry would be concentrated on there but then down the line I mean like I said earlier it's it's the remote areas that have difficulties with access to grid so you know we might well see you know wind plus hydrogen somewhere in Wales or somewhere in Scotland where you might not have the hydrogen off take directly there but then you'll have to figure out a way to transport it then you've got to move it yeah it's um I don't know I just feel like there's a lot of problems that are being solved with hydrogen not 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 um but yeah there's a big supply chain issue that issues with electrification in supply chain in planning in infrastructure I get it I just feel like come the year 2100 someone somewhere is going to be saying all right okay maybe we should have just electrified rather and skip the hydrogen bit yeah and I completely agree with you like I'm very much in the school of like Electrify what we can that's going to be the cheapest and fastest and best way of doing it and speed does matter here you know we're all like under a Net Zero by 2050 kind of going but you know there are absolutely sectors that you can't Electrify and you know the example I mentioned with existing refineries that use hydrogen for ammonia like fertilized production it's a huge industry there's actually loads of existing hydrogen demand and that's all coming from your natural gas so if we can clean that up that's a good start right 100 yeah electricity isn't going to do anything there so yeah it's about finding the right uses for it um and you know that there are some that are kind of in the middle whereas it's the whole heat pump versus hydrogen boiler debate um yeah and I I personally follow more on the the electrification side of that particular one it's so funny that um speaking to some of uh Scandinavian customers and they can't believe there's even a discussion well firstly they can't believe that um yeah that we use gas for domestic heat full stop and secondly there's even discussion about using hydrogen rather than putting heat pumps in but um I want a heat pump I don't have one I really want a heat pump in my house um but one day maybe Santa will bring one for me okay um 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 on the podcast um can 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 cfd rounds oh actually onshore winds now cfd too but um the mega projects are off offshore but what's going on onshore in in the wind world um probably people are happier than they have been in the last few years I'm sure you know onshore was very much in the UK um I think this sort of ugly stepchild whatever you want to call it you know politically there was a lot of obsession the support was just draw and then you know it's very challenging for for onshore wind developers um and that probably benefited solar storage frankly because a lot of people kind of pivoted into developing that but yeah anchor wind is sort of seeing a little bit of a Renaissance in the UK because there is that cfd support again and also the the price point frankly of onshore wind has reached a point now where you can definitely also do these projects on a subsidy free basis through corporate PPA so utility pppas and that's very kind of standard now and you know outside of the UK you're seeing projects that are you know just as big as offshore wind farms like gigawatt scale onshore projects being developed in the nordics um that are you know providing a really substantial amount of their energy demand um and in the UK it's a bit more challenging you know I think partly because um of grid yeah and also because of the planning regulations and particularly around tip height restrictions so with wind turbines you wanna get high up to access the higher wind speeds the higher you are above the ground the windier it is as you know if you go on the roof of building you'll notice so you want to build these things High okay sideways rain hitting this window right now so there's proof of audible proof a lot wind out there yeah so you want to build them to it but obviously the total AI that you can see them from further around and then from planting like if it gets more challenging it was actually getting to a point where the onshore wind sector the turbine manufacturers have moved on and they're building bigger turbines now because most markets in the world are allowing these big turbines to be installed it actually became a bit difficult in the UK to still Source turbines that are kind of stubby enough to fit within our permitted tip height envelope yeah because it's kind of Legacy models in some cases that people have to use well there's numbers here so what's a normal tip height so that's like the the maximum height is it yeah so you're looking at like the the top of the tower and then like the blade above that that would be your tip height and so what's what's a normal number for onshore wind in the UK and then how big do they go offshore what what's the difference I mean we normally talk about turbine super size of like um capacity of turbines and that's very much correlated to the size of the blades and therefore the bigger blades is the taller the tower has to be so you don't hit the bottom yeah so offshore you know people are easily building like 12 megawatt turbines now I would say that the big boom in UK onshore winds people were putting out two three megawatt turbines so way way smaller and now the current generation of onshore turbines that's being built is probably onto 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 the goal for developers is to get to like 220 meters if you can get that then that's pretty good and then you can fit in a decent sized turbine but it's not going to be possible on every site and it is difficult you know because the planning process with wind takes so long um compared to batteries or even compared to solar what um I'm really interested in that so um why does it take longer and what what's the time difference so battery you'd be able to consent like easily within a year right yeah um with a wind farm you have to you know find your sign you have to do lots of studies a lot of the time you have to do sort of burden and mammal surveys that last over the relevant season so at least a year of just survey time um and then often they go through an appears process it kind of goes back and forth so you might you know end up with certainly yeah two to four years I would say and it can't even be longer than that so to get when Farm consented and because the technology is moving on what your what developers have to do is kind of put in a sort of guess of like what kind of turbines they're going to put on there based on where they think the market will be and if it takes longer to consent a project they might have a consented Wind Farm but then they're like oh no um it doesn't make sense to put those turbines in anymore I want to put in a bigger turbine I have to go back and like seek A variation to my consent and redo a lot of my studies because I'm not dealing with taller turbines so it can really be a long drawn-out process and to be honest offshore options even longer but yeah onshore is not free from from those problems and that can 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 want to look at them and then 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 on shall 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 you know none of us are above this when something gets proposed in your back Garden you probably do think about it a little bit differently so yeah um that that element of sort of public opposition is one but again you know it's not all doom and gloom you know we're working on a wind farm right now that is that's coming into construction that's 200 megawatts that's that's a big project and you know these wind farms have a capacity factor which is like a measure of how much electricity they produce you know compared to their sort of theoretical and maximum um of like 40 onshore and that's because the UK win resource is really good it's not as good in the nordics which is also why they have to go higher in the nordics it's not as windy there I'll take that nordics yeah so Rosie over there yeah yeah so um so 200 so 200 megawatt wind farm onshore wind farm in the UK so that will do on average 40 of that right so it will do on average 80 megawatts ish um across 24 hours or across a year okay cool because we had um Ross on talking about soda recently yeah and capacity factors because there's there's like two numbers right there's someone's got a gigawatt portfolio of Renewables but it only does X uh and so um it's important to understand the differences or for me to understand anyway yeah because the solar fan capacity factor is what like 10 12 yeah okay so you've got a gigawatt solar portfolio it's like do but yeah no disrespect to the solar people out there all right so um I want to talk about batteries because that's what we love uh Above All Else of course um and you guys are doing quite a bit of work on on energy storage across technical advisory and now asset management and monitoring and some other data stuff aren't you so um what's going on in the projects that you're seeing and working on I think what's been really cool in that you okay in the last you know year or so it's just the the scale of individual projects has exploded you know and we're seeing lots of projects coming forward they're like 500 megawatts of storage in one spot or even bigger than that and then we're also seeing longer durations so maybe you know two hours so you know a gigawatt hour of storage in one spot and compared to I mean you know this was currently sort of on the system typically your maximum sort of 50 megawatts of storage that's a huge difference is still big guys yeah not not denying that but again you know when we come and say as a planning consultant helping our clients you know get consent for these projects that does make a difference because it turns from you know a couple of shipping containers to actually this is now quite a big area with you know lots of containers or lots of enclosures or some sort of Warehouse solution and you know whereas in the past it was very much like oh yeah storage will get consented nobody could possibly object to this once we talk about these bigger schemes you probably do have to do a bit more work as a developer to kind of demonstrate and analyze the impacts and make sure that you know it's all you know as it should be so the scale thing has been really cool I think and also technically really interesting because you do see people proposing Concepts like um you know warehoused systems that are sitting inside a building or double stacked um storage uh which you know as other engineers it's Maybe not maybe not the best um please do tell if fire safety is is really important and I think you know it's only taken what one major incident of a fire and on a UK battery project for planning authorities in the public to get you know way more concerned about this and frankly I think in our industry in the UK wasn't taking it seriously enough and wasn't really knowledgeable enough about this stuff and as people are developing these bigger schemes they're kind of having to you know deal with this they're having to Grapple with their insurance people who are you know putting in pretty strict requirements and asking lots of uncomfortable questions um so that that's been fun even though it's really serious topic but it's been fun um well it's just engaging with developers yeah yeah and I think you know 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 naturopath really benefited from having a a US business that's been doing storage you know for just as long as we have and have seen all of this and and yeah 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 I mean even I remember when EDF EDF built the efr battery they got the one that they got uh what's it called it's next to the power station Alex is going to kill me for forgetting this and it's got a massive blast walls between them and remember when they built that and we saw photos um back when I was at Century I was like ah this is you know these guys doing it properly Central also built a beautiful battery in a in a building with completely over engineered fire and safety stuff um because they wanted to be completely sure you know it was going to be uh that they could manage that risk and then everybody else was just putting containers in in fields yeah and shoving them right next to each other and sort of hoping for the best and really not thinking at all about the risk of you know fire propagation um and also you know the risk of First Responders having to deal with this I mean that that's the thing I think that sort of thing separation I think air separations and this um you'll be closer to the technical detail but I've got I think the school of thought at the moment is blast walls aren't necessary and Air Supply suitable air separation is enough for container our systems yeah no you don't you don't need Glass Walls if you leave enough space and if you think about your venting yeah yeah you want to vent upwards ideally yeah yeah and also access to the containers so you know we're moving away from the system where it's like a shipping container where someone has to open the door and walk inside to get to anything but being able to access the batteries from the outside is way safer yeah absolutely and um so what else are you guys working on and what are you seeing as Trends so bigger systems we talked about a half gigawatt gigawatt hour batteries um which just blows my mind I can't wait to I want to go to I want to go and walk around one of those sites when I build it it's gonna look very boring yeah ah yeah yeah it will win it I'm still gonna get excited about it and um what other what other Trends or things things are you seeing out there in the battery space well you know I think you're you guys are the experts right that is evolving Revenue stack and you know a lot of the time we're talking to developers and investors and asset owners who've come from the Renewables world who are used to when I'm just selling my electricity and I get money for it um and they really struggle with the the complex and you know slightly unpredictable and ever-changing revenue stack that is battery storage so while you know every year we see a you know a few more kind of clients of ours make that leap and be like okay we feel like we get it now we can invest in this we've convinced our our board we've convinced our shareholders to invest in storage you know it's always you still have to have that conversation yeah it's mad it's um uh I want to do the digging back now at the wind and third industry but when does solo 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 the battery world right you can be available but it's the first real Power Systems asset class where you've the way that you operate it between losing money and making money which is things is so exciting and it's a it's part of a bigger trend of um all assets now or an optimization problem you know dnos now they're 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 um you've really got me going on about this stuff now no but you're right and that's exactly what's happening and even the developers who are you know not looking at developing batteries who are just doing solo and win they have to deal with this because you know they know that in the future Merchant word it's not enough to just be like well I'm gonna dump my mega hours onto the grid whenever it's sunny or whenever it's windy like 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 and even go negative so if you're someone who's kind of exposed to that wholesale price and you're just dumping your power onto the grid that's not a way to operate a wind farm you will have to manage that risk and co-locating you know bringing it back to the hybrid point co-locating with some form of storage is a really good way of managing that yeah you're losing you're leaving a ton of money on the table how about um so Asset Management what's happening there because um I know natural power won some contracts recently I don't really allowed to talk about it but um you want some contracts to do asset management on behalf of asset owners to look after those batteries to make sure that they are running uh efficiently and effectively and um I guess until recently that wasn't really a problem right in in Wind you have to do a lot of operations and maintenance for Batteries you didn't have to do much and now suddenly I say suddenly gradually not suddenly the opposite of suddenly the the industry is way it is realizing that these things need to be looked after and similar big asset owners you know the big funds have done this from for a long long time but a lot of the newer players are it I think it's um I I think it's a surprise so it can be a bit of a surprise um did I say that diplomatically enough I don't really think so please I didn't mean to offend anyone but essentially asset management is important Hannah why oh they do sound a bit aggressive though um foreign where you're right like a wind farm solar farm you have to send people out there in a van to you know to maintain them to fix stuff to swap out Parts you do have to do that with batteries as well but it's it's less of a day-to-day activity the other thing is with wind and solo you normally get a really lovely fully wrapped operations maintenance contract where some party will do absolutely everything for you they'll manage the warranty for you they will do all the maintenance the scheduled maintenance and like responding to faults they will monitor the system Around the Clock they will write your reports you know it's all kind of packaged over give you the performance and availability warranty that'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 you know there might be another party doing the HP side of it so you kind of have more contractors and more interfaces to manage which is where an asset manager should be able to add a lot of value so I think there's that the sort of day-to-day you know 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 the sort of data and performance side of it so what is the battery doing is your Optimizer doing a good job and you know that's where companies like Moto help because they allow you to kind of see what 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 um watch the space oh you've got plans but yeah I mean that's always been a real bug bear I guess for the industry that people are very private with their data of course they are so getting that Benchmark is hard whereas in storage um it is not easy but it's possible oh just wait I'll just just waiting for that one um I think we've run out of time what else um do you want to plug anything is there anything you're working on that everyone should know about um this is the chance to get your message out there so is there anything else you want to add also no is an acceptable answer oh no I mean I do want to obviously plug stuff and we've talked about hybrids I genuinely I'm I am weirdly passionate about hybrid projects I think it makes so much sense um and I'm really excited by how much the industry is really starting to seriously rather with that and and really yeah I was thinking about what what's the best for their project and the way that's what's best for their children you know how can we find the right combinations of stuff and I think that's something we're natural power have a lot of experience in helping people figure out you know how much of the different Technologies do you put together how is it all going to work practically but also from a revenue and optimization side so if anyone who's listening is kind of getting their head around that at the moment please do get in touch well we'll put a link in the show notes and that's it I want to say Hannah that was a great conversation and um thanks for pulling me up on all the all the things all the nonsense that I talk about I want to say to anyone who's listening please do hit subscribe it really does mean the world to us and let us know what you think in the comments until next time thanks very much foreign

2023-03-20 23:38

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