You're listening to Redefining Energy.
You're co hosts from Berlin Gerard Read and from London Laurent Saga.
But y'all mayor Christmas, you too, my friend. Last episode of the year, So we're gonna wrap up everything we've seen, everything we were right about, everything was wrong about.
The Crazier, my friend, it was a crazier.
Now when you come to the podcast for twenty four we're gonna have six hundred thousand downloads, which is up twenty seven percent. You're on your We won the Leading Voice Award in energyent Communities by City Tech not no City Tech, but you know, was great to have an.
Award, Absolutely brilliant.
What was the most downloaded episode of the year, Child Gates, Yeah, Bill Gates already episode three and then the on PPA always very popular.
Yeah, I mean such a technical topic as well, it's interesting.
Right, okay, Yeah, so we do another one in February and then Google so anything around AI that aren't a lot of interest.
The top the real big topics of the year, right.
Yeah, yeah, batteries. All the batteries episode also were very popular. The most commented was the one we did the last months on Nossholt, which went crazy. We can see what the wind blows, whereas everything around any division Z or climate nobody's interested anymore.
Yeah, it's funny. It's one of the conclusions I get out of twenty twenty four is this transition now is all about economics, now politics. It's not about climate change anymore, you know, totally.
We used to talk about the famous traffecta security, affordability and clean This is not the case anymore. Now it's okay, security first, but then there's growth and for the first time there is growth in the US, not in Europe. And I have a quote from a very brilliant girl called Chris Seiple, is the head of power at the Woodmark and he said, this year a seventiear trend of declining share of electricity to GDP has been reversed.
And let me add to that as well, it's also the first year really in over a decade where maybe even fifteen years, we're in the Western world we're actually saying electricity demand beginning to go up as opposed to down, and actually that's going to continue to go forward. Right.
Yeah, we talk about data centers. There are about five thousand data centers in the US, and if you take Germany pers UK Press, they are not even two thousand. America is on fire and Europe is on zenas.
I'm not going to disagree with you, by Fred, I'm not going to disagree with you because my sort of reflections on the air is just I just think Europe as sleeping. That's in every way just sleeping.
You need a ted ex Bolin which was really brilliant because I am totally incapable of talking in front of a live audience.
Yeah, I had a lot of fun, I must have met. It was the first time I've ever done it, and it's amazing. Really, You when you do something like that, you just reach a different target audience important, right, we need to This transition that we're going through is not easy, and it's part of what we're doing is educating people, right, and so we want to educate as many people as we can.
Your thesis, which we've been talking NonStop on this podcast is the four driver of the energy revolution no transition, solar batteries, semiconductors, and China.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I've changed the word semiconductors to energy intelligence at this point. More than that. Yeah, sorry, and the other thing I think you've just said. What you just said was China. I mean, this is two thousand and twenty fours the year of China. When it comes to energy, they dominate the production of all these energy technologies we talk about, but also they're installing them, not just exporting them. They're going and install them in their
own country. Right. The biggest market ev is, biggest market for solder, biggest mark of for wind. They're shown the way.
Forward and you start seeing it in the numbers because following an expert, respectator John Kemp, he says that China will import less oil in two twenty four than tour twenty three.
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
And that's not debatable, you know, it's not a percentage of the growth of this all that, it's simply they're going to import less oil.
Yeah.
Other interesting figures a lot coming from that. India consumes more cold than the US plus the EU.
Well there's the biggest country in the world in terms of population, so there's no surprise, you know, the they all want to be at the same living standards that we do. So yeah, they're going to consume energy energy energy.
For the next years, US electric fleet consumes more power than US electric trains. Okay, interesting, huh interesting. Okay, So now I've got a list of influencers, so I just want to name them because these are the people I follow, and whether it's on LinkedIn, whether it's on X or now you've got blue Sky, which I think is a is a bit of a subper version of X. But did you open your account on Blue Sky or not?
No? I didn't know.
Well whatever, Okay, So for EV's James Scouter, Tom Zug Malcot, June Kyle Chan, Roger at King Sky, Kent Felix Summer. If you just follow those guys, you know everything that's happening in EV's Solar. It's always gingy chase, but I mean Solar. I mean, you wonder if you need to follow it. It's crazy.
We just keeps growing, of course, keep falling. Yeah, it's simple.
The growth of the batteries. But we supply chain. We have some very good guys we're following. Aaron Wait, Carma Cole, Chris Berry, Matt Firmley, Simon Moore's Jeloy. When it comes to Litia Press of lithium this year ten thousand a ton. It's flat production going up, a lot of discussion around Palmer market, around capture prices, great source and burne er g Dave Jones, Stephen Woodhouse on Earth, Vigan, everything that's around PPAs picks up Park, everything that's around batteries is model.
Great people out there that actually we can follow. And obviously listen, Well we haven't talked about Lauren. I like to talk about is hydrogen and hydrogen. Listen, We've got Paul Martin, Tom Baxter, people like that that we that we follow very closely. Yeah, But anyway, and he comments on twenty twenty four and hydrogen.
But hydrogen beats the record of a project announcer never delivered because it's just too expensive. The current state of hydrogen affairs look like this. Electoralizers that do not exist are supposed to use excess electricity that does not exist to feed hydrogen into a greed that does not exist in order to power plants that do not exist. Alternatively, hydrogen is supposed to be transported via ships and port that do not exist for suppliers country that you guess
it also do not exist, you know Zeidler. Oh my god. And despite that, and I want to pass the clip there is a guy in Germany, the CEO of BMW, who still thinks hydrogen at the future. Let's listen to the clip.
In our industry, timing is crucial. Pioneered the technology together with the right partness, and we have brought it to the road. Now it's time to unleash the full potential of hydrogen. A mildestone in automotive history. We are announcing the first ever serious production fuel cell electric vehicle to be offered by a global Bremium manufacturer, powered by hydrogen. It will underscore how technological brokess is shaping future mobility.
Oh God, but I don't want to give any comments on hydrogen. Let's listen to a ne expert. You're gonna find out very quickly who he is.
We're gonna have hybrids, We're gonna have gasoline propelled cars, We're not gonna have hydrogen cars. You know, hydrogen cars is the new thing, right you know about that? Hydrogen is the new car. They say it's great. Has one problem. If it explodes, you dead. If it explodes, they actually say, if it is you're unrecognizable. You call your wife over.
They call up the wife.
Would you please come here and take a look and see whether or not this is your husband, because we cannot see. And she goes to the nearest tree, which is about one hundred yards away, and she says, it's only blood. There's nothing there since I can't tell. So hydrogen has one problem. It's extraordinarily dangerous. Other than that, the car works quite well.
Actually, well, let's return to good news, because one thing I think is very important laur On is the entrepreneurs in this space.
And actually, if I look back in our podcast, we've had We've had a few really successful ones and some that haven't been so successful. But it's really important to have this innovation in there. So if you were looking at the entrepreneurs in our space, you would just say you look up.
To well, look the one who came on the show, and that the most narration for Greg Jackson, David Sky's book, Sheldon Kimber, all of them have developed a huge, huge capacity innovation, created billion dollar company. I'm really privileged to be able to do this podcast so we can interact with those people.
And just see people you know. Greg Jackson is the CEO founder of Octopus Energy. David Squay's Brook is the CEO founder of Quinn book, which is very interesting asset management. And then Sheldon Camber is the CEO of really really interesting ask developer, you know.
Your intersect power. He just signed a gigantic deal with Google.
Can I ask you, what have you read this year that you've enjoyed?
Okay, so we have our books of the years. There are six that caught my eyes so well. Richard Black, The Future of Energy, Our Vulnerable Energy Future by Dougarrant, hash cut Ratti, The Climate Capitalism Super Great Super Solutions that's from Idioconostic and Edition, The Coming Wave from Mustafa Suleiman, and finally Jimmy Chase Solar Finance without the jargon. All these books are of course around the energy, about the
energy revolution, except the Coming Wave. You want to say something about it, I'm.
Gonna say my favorite one was The Coming Wave from Mustafa Sulimon. And this is on AI and what AI is going to have in terms.
Of impact on the world.
And I say that also because AI is going to have a huge impact on the energy space as well. Obviously we need data centers, etcetera, etcetera. And I think it's really critical that whether they are Google, Microsoft or whoever it is you need to be part of the solution, and we need to get them really involved, much more involved in the energy transition than they have been up to now. So anyway, I thought that book was great for those of you who don't know who he is.
He is a very interesting London born entrepreneur who ended up, you know, his business being bought. It was booked by Google, wasn't it, deep minds. Yeah, so very interesting, very interesting.
Okay, So to kind of finish off my echo of the years, Kiril Buddhadov. Why but you know he is. He's the head of the Ukrainian g u R and he's the guy who blew up all the Russian refineries, doing more for fighting Clemagin than anybody else.
Under On one other topic that sort of came, I've changed my view in and around environmentalists, and don't forget I am actually an environmentalist deep down, but I think the approach of many environmentalists is too extreme at this point in time. What I mean by that is the world is not black and white, it's gray, and we need to move forward quickly. But a lot of environmental
movement is actually stopping change happening. Right, And I was looking recently at just the whole area of data centers, and you've had, sorry, Friends of the Earth come out and I'm talking about a report they did in Ireland where they come out and basically say, hey, listen, forget about this AI data center stuff because the end of the day, we won't be able to hit our climate goals. The world is not black and white. AI is so
important that I think you have to rethink. So you know, give loads of examples, but one, for example is let's say the Tesla factory outside Berlin, which has been You've had people basically living in the forest there preventing the cutting down of trees there, and they've been doing this for the last two and a half years. And I
sort of look at that and got I'm sorry. You've got a company here that is actually, in terms of impact on carbon emissions worldwide, they will have a greater impact for the positive world than anything else than any other company across the world because they pushed the electrification of the automobile, etcetera, etcetera. And so that's me the bigger picture, and it's the world is not black and white.
And as I said, i'd I don't believe that black and white is really helpless, and I think perfectly in the European perspective, but also in the US, this black white approach means that a lot of people they just become anti climate change really, which is not helpful for any pot The.
Problem of enviamentalist is they surfer from what I call the niavana fallaci, which is, if it's not one hundred percent perfect, let's not do it. So they talk about the mining impact and stuff like that. They don't see that if you take green Bush, which is the biggest mine for lithium in the world. So they talk about the abomination of green Bush in Australia, but from a surface perspective, it's only one third of one coal mine for one power plant. Get very emotional. They have no
idea of the orders of magnitude. We're talking about too much emotion.
That's a good way problem. Too much emotion, and actually we need to get practical. That's what we need to do, right, Yeah, else you'd say about two thousand.
Dolly, Well, look twenty twenty four. If you want to summarize up what has been going up, relentless grows of solar explosion of batteries, eves, despite it in the media as the EV is going down now the even's still going up, but has been also the extraordinary rise of gas turbines everywhere. I mean, if you look at the shares of GVA and over Simon's Energy, it's fantastic. Every time I meet young people, I see their enthusiasm, their innovation,
the new take digital This is fantastic. Now I am begging, begging, begging Europe to deregulate, I mean too creatures the bonfire of all those regulations that are just hampering the progress, because that's what's happening in the US, and I'm not even talking about China. These are my ups.
Oh god. Actually, that's a very, very, very good point. I agree with your Tolkien. Europe is totally over regulated, and really we set it up around because at the end of the day, we've set up a European Commission that has one job and that as the regular right, and they have the more the more they regulate, the more power they have. So this is a pretty crazy situation. We put ourselves into it, and it's not helpful because
what ends up happening is we're just stifling innovation. And I'm trolling a bureaucracy.
Maybe before we leave, just one word to say, as the Biden administration is going to depart, I want to setute the work done by at the US LOOM program the past four years. It's an extraordinary achievement what they've managed to do. Not everything is going to be successful, but they gave their golden letter back to the world industrialth policy and the US is going to benefit for decades of the work done by Jigasha and the Biden administration.
Yeah. I wish Tigger all the best.
Or don't worry for him. I'm sure yes. De proposal on his desk right now. Oh yeah, and he deserves them. That's the job. I wish you merry Christmas. And our first episode of the year is as usual our predictions where you are always right and I'm always wrong because I'm specific and you're vague.
I'm going to be I promise next year I'm gonna be specific. Okay, cheers, good by friend Joy. Thank you for listening to Redefining Energy. Don't forget to rate the show and subscribe on Apple podcast Spotify for the platform of your choice.