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Berlin Gerard Reed and from London Laurent Segala. Today on Redefining Energy, we're going to talk about mobile batteries.
And mobile batteries are energy storage system between one kido what and one mega what? Do you have it on traders or in ten food container? And the reason it's ten food container it's a question of weight. Ten food container is going to weigh about ten to twelve tons and if it's above twenty twn it becomes a very conversone to move.
And if I understand what you're doing is you're using these really insane of diesel gen sets, so construction sites, film sites, and you're also increasingly beginning to used as part of the grid. Yeah, and asten because we want to learn a little bit more about this area. We've done is we've got a great guy on Peter Paul van Vorst was the SEAO of the mobile battery management platform called School.
I've known Peter pol for now four years and he leads a remarkable team. So they're based in Rotterdam and they've been starting to manage those batteries seven years ago and now I think they've got more than a thousand batteries and under management. So we'll explain what under management means a lot of knowledge in hardware, but also the fantastic development in the software a year and esson just.
From my side, apologies that I actually was during the interview. My internet connection died. I was actually on an Irish ferry from France to Dublin.
Yeah, so I conducted the interview alone, but send you the tape so you know what we talked about.
For once, let's bring Peter Paul on.
Peter pol welcome to the show.
Thank you very much.
Jad is on a boat somewhere in the Irish see carrying his precious cargo of Irish whiskey, so he might join or not. I don't really know. So we're going to start by a very simple question. Can you explain to our listeners what you put in the concept of mobile batteries or what's the smallest, what's the biggest?
Yeah, definitely. So mobile batteries, or mobile energy systems as we call them, are systems between roughly one kilowatt and one megawat that are all used to have energy storage and energy generation. If it's for example, cleaner generators for temporary applications. And then you can think of construction sites, film sets, factories that want to get a new machine
in but have to wait for a great connection. So everything with a temporary nature where you don't want to wait for the stationary infrastructure, and definitely where you don't want to use a diesel generator.
I guess the type of chemistry service is very similar from what we have in Let's says a stationary storage pretty.
Much definitely, and I would say even probably a bigger share of LFP batteries than in stationery search or mobility because volume or density is not such a big issue. These are mostly ten food containers or the smaller ones are trailers that you can toby in the car, and density is not the biggest issue. So we especially look for safe and reliable systems that are plug and play and you can deploy wherever you bring them.
The suppliers, I guess, are pretty much a list of people which we know or do they have specialty suppliers.
There are definitely different types of suppliers, but what they all have in common is their business model is buying these systems from manufacturers and then keeping them on their balance sheet to rent out to other companies, and through Scones online marketplace, we facilitate the rental process and we also give these suppliers a lot of soft for tools so that all of the data is in one place and they can use AI to save all up of time and to also make a lot more money.
When we took about the use of mobile batteries, I like to dig a bit more into detail because on one hand, you would have the basic power bank, I would say, so basically you're going to just charge and discharge, So I don't know why you charge, probably directly on the greed of the desagenitos and the discharge. And then you've got more sophisticated batteries where literally it's going to be much more multifunction and plug pretty much on everything
and dis charge on everything. How do you see the product evolution.
Over the last seven years that we've been doing this, that's gone. We've kind of developed a very simple way of doing this, which is a customer comes to us because they want energy, they want electricity, and then the first step we take is to see what their big pot amount is. Based on that, we scale the battery system.
Then we look at what their capacity need is, so their energy usage electricity search across twenty four hours or the whole period of the project, and based on that we choose the source of the electricity, which indeed, as you say, should always be a great connection if you
can that can check or charge the battery system. But if that's not enough or not available at all, then we go down a list, which is do we have space to place extra temporary solar, do we have the possibility to deploy a hydrogen generator, or in the worst case, do we have the last option of deploying a fossil
fuel generator, which we definitely don't want to do. But at least by working this way and working in this order, we can swap out the fossil fuel generator as soon as we've gathered a bit of data, and we can then make that cleaner and cleaner as we go along.
So it's not the same usage as those stationary storage to work more on the transmission level, and you know, we're talking fifty media a lot, and really these are like football fields. This is much more granular. I would say, it's much more adaptable to distribution system or your neighborhood or small industrial sites. So it's really a niche of its own.
Yeah, we definitely operate at the SO level or below, and the reason of being is that's the level where you can take quick steps. Where we are in the energy transition now is a time where we need to look for quick solutions that can be implemented tomorrow. So if you are a factory, you can call us today
and we'll have a solution in place next week. And that's only possible if you look at it from a temporary nature where you can start deploying with a number of batteries and then you can scale up and down based on the actual usage and the seasonallyties of the energy usage, but also keeping it modular so that you can really scale it to what is needed exactly and
keep the cost slow. And because most of the challenges in the energy transition are the decentralized generation of electricity and also the electrification of businesses and homes and mobility, all of that is playing on the SOO level and below.
Let's assume there is a ten foot container which is going to be I don't know, root and fifty K two hours or something like that. But if I order six, I can plug them all with cables and that become a one point five megawa battery or two hours, so that works. They can work in parallel or in series, so you can be.
Too depending on whether power or storage or capacity and kilob What hours is your need.
And two hours is what you see that the market needs in general?
Yeah, generally yes, because anything above two hours is probably going to be too much capital in cells just waiting around to be used. And anything below that also kind of takes away the benefit of having a buffer in place. So if you have a shorter time that you can store the kilob of hours, that takes away the for example, optimization when working with generators or solar.
It's a market I've been looking into. I mean the secret We've known each other for four years now. Every time I go, you know, on an exhibition, there's always the guy with the twenty foot container. I say, oh, but you know, you can pack eight mika whateur or whatever in our continents. What do you think of the limitation of trying to you know, having those two big containers or too heavy versus the tope of application we're seeing right now.
The luxury we had is we started from a world of rentals, so we started from a very practical side of the deployment of these systems. So we've been working on construction sites and film sets and factories and grid operators for many years now, and then when working in practice, you really see what are the real issues, and that is, for example, how much weight can you put on an average truck because you want to use an average truck
to keep the transportation cast slow. What is the average footprint you have on any given site, what is the
average size that you place. And based on all of those data points, we've seen that there's not necessarily a lot to win in putting a lot of kiloverde hours in a cubic meter, but there's a lot to win in just making it practical, making sure it works, making sure that the software on the battery container is properly functioning, so that it's a reliable system that you can plug and play in that wide range of applications where those batteries will be used.
And of course also as those batteries, I mean, they're not going to move every week, but they're going to move several times during the year, so you have always the issue of the who's going to carry it. So you know, in terms of forklift or crane or whatever, I guess you'll find much more equipment that can carry ten tones than forty tones.
Definitely, definitely, and it has been an issue in the beginning, but now it's a mature industry and that's an exciting moment because that's also the moment at which we can really start thinking of the potential beyond rental. Been working for years understanding the energy systems and understanding how they
work and also when they don't work. And we've been spending years on understanding the energy user, their energy profiles, their needs, what is important to them, and bringing those together, and then also from scone side, bringing that all into one marketplace, into one platform that operates globally and helps to really be a strong force in the energy transition and being able to help fight great congestion.
At skill we talk about the hardware. Let's go in the digital part, because the difference of these oginitos, which are really a very rustic technology. Here it's a much more sophisticated beast. I learned a few years ago there are two layears of software inside the battery, what called the BMS and the EMS. So can you explain first of all, listeners, the difference between the two.
Yeah, the BMS is the battery management software and that is what is you to really keep the battery modules alive. But you could have tens of hundreds of battery modules inside any given battery container. The battery container as a whole also includes temperature management, safety systems, location data, all of that and that comes together in the EMS, the
energy management system. And there's still different terms going around for this, but it basically comes down to how do we put a software system inside that battery container so that that battery container on one side can talk to a lot of different energy sources to remain charged, and on the other side, can it talk to different energy users.
So different frequencies, different voltages, different power outputs, different load profiles, different ramp up times, ramp down times, all those different things you have to think of because it's going to be used by so many users. To also make sure that it can compete on costs against the diesel generators.
If I some of eyes. The butty management system is really inside the battery and the EMS is the interface between the battery and the outside world.
Yes, exactly on location. And then scone is the interface between all of those unique energy systems and you as a user and you as a good operator.
Yeah, because there is so much data going on, and of course we need to monitor remotely the state of charge, the set of discharge, making sure that the battery is not just too much or there are a certain parameters of use. And then the moment you start having a fleet of batteries ten twenty one hundred, if it's not globally managed by you layer of asset manager. If you want to manage that by Excel sheets, it's not going to work.
We've seen people try, but then they do end up using scone software tools because we bring together both the energy data layer, so everything that the EMS produces in terms of energy points, and we bring that together in the same environment, the same platform where they also use all the commercial tools, so also all of the data
points around money are in there. And one of the simple tools we have, for example, is a decision tool, which can make a simulation when a customer is in contact with the salesperson what the cost is going to be of a dec generator setup versus a clean setup. And people are surprised how often it's actually cheaper to
go cleaner, and people almost don't believe it. And that's why we build a decision tool, which is a really objective and very transparent tool that make sure that all the assumptions that somebody wants in there can be altered all the way to matching the realistic project of the customer. And then still you'll see that it's cheaper to just go cleaner because people often forget the fuel that pay for.
Plus on the top of that, I guess you calculated the CEO two avoided emissions.
Exactly CO two NOx PM, all of the emissions that are now big part of commercial processes. Because in the end that's our goal. We just need to have more and more commercial deployments of these systems, which is either because people can save money or because people can win more projects because of the CO two savings KNOC savings rather types of emissions that would be limited by the companies giving our tenders for construction projects for example.
But you know the best clients is those who don't have the choice. It's like, yeah, exactly, love the battery, I need a battery. I'm going out of business. Have you seen that. I mean, I guess the past five years or six years you've been doing that, you've seen the batteries really progressing from a technological point of view. So talk a bit about that, Talk a bit about how the SOFTWARELS has improved over time.
Yeah, definitely, And what's really nice to see is that there is rapid innovation and rapid improvement on all the levels, from sell level all the way to container level. There are steps being taken. And what's the most interesting thing is you'll find out that the most important part of any given system is the software that it's using and
the software that it is connected to. So the software that it's using make sure that the system will always stay alive despite the fact it's being used in so many different applications, and the software is connected to will give it a gateway to revenue, and that gateway to revenue is something that people often forget, and that's also
the strength of mobile batteries. By connecting it to scone, for example, you get the access to the marketplace where you can get a lot of rental customers, but you also get access to grid services, so you can do energy trading and congestion management, and that is key because what you want to do with these assets is constantly be making money and not depend on maybe one source of revenue.
Let me unpack that. So what you're saying is you act first as a kind of broker between battery owners and clients, so that's a bit of a classic. But then on the top of that, you act as manager once those batteries are operating, so you can track them
hour by hour or you know, or most live. But also if there is no client per se, your client becomes the grid, so you can plug them I don't know where, and you'll tell me in which country it works or it doesn't work, and be able to provide whatever frequency services or daily habitrasure or I don't know what. PISA elaborate a bit.
Yeah, you hit an eline headler. It's really that combination between their companies wanting to replace THEESEL generators. They are willing to pay for this, and you have the electricity grid and they are already paying for this through existing energy trading markets, and that is just going to expand, and we see in every country where we are active.
We're active in fourteen countries now that the the energy markets are developing at such a rapid rate because we see that the stationary infrastructure of the grid is not going to be able to keep up, and we see that all their sources of flexibility are not going to be enough. So every grid operator in the world is
looking for new sources of flexibility. And what we do with scone, we don't only give flexibility in time by providing storage where you can do some flexibility across the day, but we also provide flexibility in space because a lot of the congestion issues are seasonal three months a year or are temporary until the time that the stationary infrastructure is indeed being built. And by providing that combination of flexibility in time and space, the grid operators globally can
really rely on us. And that's also why we made sure to first build that suite of software tools and the network in the marketplace so that we would be at the right skill be a reliable partner to grid operators. And you could say, be the flexible layer of the electricity grid.
That's the best business model. You're providing duct tape to a creaking system, Yeah, exactly.
And in the end we had conversations also internally, but what if the grid is solved by then. Well, first of all, that's probably quite far out, and second of all, we do foresee a future in which we start to actually get used to this duct tape and we start seeing it as the safest, most reliable solution that we can build on. And that is also on us to make sure that our software continuously develops and that our reliability and security is indeed at the level that the
grid operators want us to be. But it is going to be an integral part of every electricity grid to be moving around energy infrastructure to whereas needed.
Most So I'm going to give you some use have been thinking about. You're going to tell me if it's me dreaming of if I'm onto something. Okay, let's assume I'm a new EV charging station and for whatever reason, I have not pushed it to the maximum, and during the summer, people are going to start queuing because it takes too much time. So would those EV chargers install a mobile battery for the summer to cope with extra dive? Can you envision that.
That is definitely an example of one of our customers. It is not as widely used in EV charging because the extra revenue that an ev charger can get from having that actual capacity is limited. But for example, a factory that buys a new production machine for their production line, when they call the grid operator, they will not get that space. Or entire neighborhoods which actually have a higher usage in the winter because of all the heating that
is electric, right, those also get in trouble. And that's the level at which we're now scaling these solutions is for dsls at serious power outputs, making sure that those months where you struggle, that those are solved so that we're not going to lock up the grid for years, because in those few months a year and then those few hours a day in those months, there is technical congestion.
Do you know what's the average time for a new transformer right now?
For the hardware of a transformer? Yeah, I would say that's the easier part. Let's talk about the pyramits, and let's talk about other people involved, and let's talk about three years, okay, permitting part nine years maybe?
Yeah. So I guess while a new transformer can arrive to reorganize the power fluid in the neighborhood, some of the solutions you propose would make sense. How many batteries do you have under management right now compared to say two years ago, and how do you see yourself into a three time.
We're now getting into the thousands, which is exciting news because we're going to need many And this is on one part, because the rental industry is massively growing in this space because of CO two emission regulations, because of NOx emission regulations, because of electrification of machinery, and all of that is growing. While at the same time grid operators and are knocking on our doors and also seeing this as one of their solutions to solve grid congestion.
And so those markets all together are probably going to accelerate the growth line of number of systems, but also a number of countries where we're active with our platform
because it is the only way forward. Flexibility is what we need in electricity, grid electrification is what we need as a society, and our role in NET is bringing them all together in one platform, aggregating all the data, building the best AOLS on top of it, so that it's also very easy to find, very easy to use, very easy to report on, and so that on a commercial level, we can also compete with what the alternatives would.
Be oh so beautiful. I'm sorry, Ja, he's stuck on his boat, so he could not participate to.
The He could not participate to the conversation, but he always concludes without listening to the interview, and when he's cornered, he talk about Harris Risky. So that's good to know.
That's always good.
Yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thank you very much.
Ern So Lauran. I usually finished this podcast I sort of asking what the future is, but I want to ask you because at the end of the day, you're also investing your own money in this area, so you really are a big believer. So tell me a little bit about how you see that market in the future and why you think is really interesting.
Five years ago I wrote a piece and said energy storage the next ina set. It has de developed beyond my wildest dreams, and we're at the point where those batteries benefit from everything that has been done in ivy and stationary storage. So we're having product which are becoming
extremely useful, extremely versatile. And when I started looking into those batteries, they were all an MCS and we had liquid cooling, and now we've get l FPS air cooling and all the regulation in Europe, and I've seen a lot of them are on fire and the fact that you use l FP totally mitigate the fire risk. So in fact they're going to be accepted in much more use case than they used to be.
Plus you've also got the price of these battery systems going down, which means the market is just going to open up more.
Yeah. Absolutely, since I started, the price of the batteries have gone down forty percent.
Now.
Of course we're all tracking the cells, which of course I've gone down even faster, but we're buying full systems, which means the plugs, the antifier system, the HVAC, the invertors. So in fact, if you look at those systems, I would say the cells maybe they represent twenty to thirty percent of the overall costs and the rest is really about software. It's really about also maintenance guarantees making sure
their track all the time. And that's a big advantage they have over these ogenerators is that all those batteries are plugged and we can track minute by minute how they charge the discharge. And what's also very interesting is it means we can track them from tradle to grave. We know after x months, x years how fast they degrade.
Yeah, Court, I can see that really interesting. Okay, well I wish you all the best investment you're doing in that area.
Well, as usual, the Excel sheets are beautiful, the poor point are phenomenal, but at some point you need to go. So we're going to invest some money and I'll tell you in a year if it was very smart. Ok If it's very smart, everybody's going to do it. And if it was very stupid, I'm sure some people we say alone, we told you so, but you don't know
until you do it, So no, you don't. And yes, of course we're going to rely extensively on Scoon to manage them because they really bring a lot of knowledge of client use cases, but also you know, stuff like logistics, the cables, all those things. It's much more than just a software company. Okay, very good, Peter Poll and all
this team. I've been to Rotterdam several times and these are really young, remarkable people, and from a human perspective, it's great to see so much enthusiasm and talent in those startups compared to sometimes the doom and gloom we see everywhere. The young generation is formidable.
So there's all, absolutely all, there's hope.
Well, thank you for.
Thank you for being there, Thank you for being there in spirit, in spirit.
Okay, job, talk to you next week.
Have good week. Thank you for.
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