With Laurent's segal end from London and Gerard read from Berlin. This is redefining energy.
Today. On redefending energy, we're gonna talk about resilience and jab you have demonstrated resilience when you went a few days ago in Davos.
Yeah, resilience is about recovering Laarn and it takes your time to recover from Davos because it is the craziest circus, certainly in Europe anyway, because what you've got is obviously global leaders from across the world meeting, and then you've got global business leaders, and then you just got a whole pile of hangers on. Obviously, I think there was people there who thought I was a billionaire because they were going up to me and asking if I would
like to set up a foundation in Lichtenstein. And I do, But that's all the side of ends. It is crazy, you know.
Crazy, crazy crazy. So what did you do there?
Obviously what I did was I took part at in various different breakfast debates and attended quite a lot of events and that paper. That's what I did. And what do I take out of it? Well, I suppose we used to talk about energy dominance in the United States perspective. I think I just call it American dominance now because the whole main street in Davos, which is called a promenade, it was just full of US tech businesses. What I came back with was just the sense of, I suppose
the strength of technology in the United States. I think that was the big thing. And obviously the US government took over a church. Yeah, the church is usually the highest place in a village or a town, so that tells you something, you know.
So no, it was interesting in particular meeting well.
I think really the most interesting thing was not really in the energy space. It was just in the AI space. It's just so much changing there. Because of the speed of change there, it's even more difficult to predict what's going to happen from an energy perspective. The words we're moving beyond large language models to what they call world models, which probably require even more energy usage empower usage. And then also then just the usage cases for AI are
just expanding. And again it's just even the experts themselves finding it very difficult to predict. So anyway, very exciting and actually, by the way, there was beyond all seriousness there was an awful lot of talk about resilience as well, which in other words, resilience in and around the wider energy system. There was obviously talk about cybersecurity, physical security, the grid and really do we have enough energy? That's
the other thing. Certainly, I'd say from the United States point of view, there's a scramble there to get energy. The grid is not in a good situation. And then from a European perspective, it is definitely just making sure that there is something that happens to your power system that you can recover really quickly. And that's sort of what resilience is, and I suppose that's what we're going to talk about on this podcast.
Yeah, so we have invited Ronnie Furen, the founder of Militia NMG. It's one of your friends who probably describe a bit what he does.
Ronnie is an expert in the whole energy space and has done a whole pile of stuff in and around generation grid, you name it. Based in Norway, knows that space very well and I thought it'd be good just to have someone come out up from a Nordic point of view. And the reason for that is because the Nordics as we look at them, I've sort of already electrified. They've electrified heat, They've electrified a lot of industry, and someone like Norway will be a leading electric EVA is exactly exactly.
Yeah, and they're very close to the Russians.
And they're very close to Russians.
Now for our listeners, this is a super hyper geeky interview.
Absolutely, yeah, sometimes you have to have them. Let's bring him on the show. Ronnie. Great to have you on the show.
Thank you and really looking forward to me part of the show.
Ronnie. I'm going to start a quote with somebody Jard and I we admire and came on the show a few years ago. It's Doug Houseman and du Gasman said on the difference between reliability and resiliency. Reliability is how well you keep the light on. Resiliency is how fast you get them back on after an outage. Is that the definition that you would share?
Yes, absolutely, that's summons up quite well. We tend to mix those two words, so yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. That's what you can understand the difference, because that's the daily work of ad so or a grid operator trying to establish one out of those two.
And I'm glad Laurent started with that actually because it leads on to them. What you're talking about is when something goes wrong, how quickly can we sort the situation out? And I think that's really what we want to talk about, because I think earlier in the year what we saw was this attack on part of West Polin grid where ultimately there was a power cable that was burned through and suddenly it took them five days to get it back on. But that doesn't sound to me to be very resilient.
Yeah, we have seen that many times in a way where I work. If it also just be a tree, it could be snow creating trouble and a tree accidentally hits a power line and then the same thing happened. So this is part of our daily job trying to solve these issues and try to be as resilient as possible.
I think we live in a world today where we can't do it out electricity. It's just we're so dependent on it that again, the resilience you're talking about, seeing snow falling on a tree or you know, sys on a line, or the line falling over resilience then is you have to get there quickly and get it up again.
There's a question I'm asking as a great prosers, So how could you really preventing or seeing the risks instead of dealing with the risks so that you don't have to go and go into resilience mode and go out and repair and all that type of stuff. Would you look at your industry and say, we do a good job, do you do bad job?
First of all, I would say there are as many answers that there are companies to the company that I represent fifty or so and they do an amazing job. But you have to remember that a resilient grid, that's a digital grid, and it's a secure grid in many layers, and it's getting more and more decentralized. That challenge the operators and the company itself to handle, and it is getting more and more intelligent as well. And then you
get the integration part. You need to see the integration with the customers and the partners that we have and the tech providers that we have. But also you need to be flexible and dynamic, and you need to be automated. You also need to be real time data. And then you also need to be autonomous in the future. So just imagine all those buzzwords into answering the question are we resilient in upper or not? So it comes down to we need to be much more resilient than we
are today. It comes down to we need to add more layers and your types of tools that we didn't have ten years back or five years back, but even last year.
Can we build on that? Because you used all those buzzwords and that's all very twenty first century. But if I look at the twentieth century and the grid that was built, then I don't believe that your grid operator is actually applying these technologies today. And I'm going to just use the example of that Berlin grid, But if I could go and take the German grid as a whole, there ain't any smart meters there so you can see
what's going on in the distribution grids. If you don't see what's going on, how can you build a resilient system with all those beautiful buzzwords you talked about.
Oh, I totally agree, And that's why it's buzzberds because most of the companies don't have all those tools. So someone probably don't even have any of those tools, and I didn't even mention AI because AI is part of every single part of those toolbox. What it can say is that when I talk to about these buzzwords, that's the future that they need to put into degree operators.
But you also where the typical is see now that they've been working inside and operations center, working with fantastic colleagues, there are so many reasons why, even though they have heard about the persberous years, there are many barriers that they need to handle. They can be how they invest in them, how they start using them. There could be
regulatory frameworks that are keeping them moving slower. So there are so many reasons why, and it all comes down to having a strategy where you have decided how resilient do you want to be according to the realistic budget that you have, but also how can you try to turn it around to create resiliency within the future technology because every single layer needs hands in its minds in these resources, so you have to prioritize those quickly to
address basically all of them. At the same time, if you don't go into the discussion about how you told this in general, you might lose out on some key point. So I totally agree. There are many operators that are lacking a lot of data.
So you look about tools, you talk about metadurgyes, and you talk about operators. First of all, are operators discussing one with another and can exchanging best practices or not really? And you talk about tools, I mean what tools?
Of course, the operators are talking together, but have remembered that the gift is going really fast. You often see you have a key group of operators that are actually working on operating desk, and then they are the brains and hands trying to navigate whatever meets them every single
day twenty four seven. They need even more information that they can get from their systems because the greed is moving so quickly into the new world that if they don't have quick tools that can help them analyze the situation or help them making decisions or even predict what's going to happen, you end up running around asking questions to your colleagues inside operation center, outside operating oeration center her and that is where the future grids more about
having information, giving you the correct day information at the correct time to help them do a lot of good decisions, but also doing decisions without manpower that could be done by artificial intelligence or knowledge rule based sessions.
Like if I look at Norway and I look at the Norwich in general, I sort of say, you've already electrified your societies, right, You heat with electricity, A lot of your industry is electricity based, and obviously you're very trom digital. And the reason I'm saying that is because the rest of your electrifying our energy systems. So there's probably a lot that we could learn from you. So what do you think we can learn from you?
Besides being an advisor for a So I also work with one of Norway's largest business areas. I have four hundred business buildings, tens of house of people, so I've been most of my time, I've actually been sitting on the other side of the desk helping customers, households and businesses doing energy efficiency and or kinds of investment now and I both sites and one of the things that
we really and would do more of that. But you also can learn from Europe is how these smart meters actually also started the enablement of getting customers and grid cooperating closer together, being more integrating. Now certainly they can care more data in between each other, so you can make better and more efficient decisions. But you also have to remember that these smart meters that you typically have today are not as fast as would like. That's typically
data also that we can summon up historical data. We need even more submeters connected to the grid. And one very specific example with Norway is the electric vehicle fleet. As you know, we have a huge amount of evs being sold, more than ninety five percent last year at TV on one point two were petrol and diesel together, and that was a big concern many years back, you know, how could we even tackle all those evs around the grid.
But over a few years we realized that smart charging infrastructure actually moved most of the stress that we were actually and not looking forward to get. So the price points were basically telling the smart chargers and the smart meters that don't charge when you plug in. So the system solved those heaks that were we were afraid of by moving most of the charging unite without doing anything
from the greed. Basically, they're just the market solved itself, and many of that was because of smart meters and then smart submeters on the charging infrastructures and we see that on other components as well, So I would say smart submitters and giving data, but also smart meters or other infrastructure that I can also collect data from the grid for example when you need flexibility or you need help, so then you actually can respond in millisecond That would
definitely help. That we've done a lot of that in a way.
Can I follow open that? Because I think it's very important to hear this because if I understand, what you've done is you don't have a centralized approach where you go and switch on and off the charging. What actually happens is you're incentivizing the customer or maybe even the retail electricity provider to provide taras to the customer so that this is done automatic. Am I right when I say that? And it's so because you just enlarge on that.
So you have different price points that you could use butuse. You have the spot price itself and the cost of energy, and you have your plan. They are typically high afternoon or in the morning, and the smart charging infrastructure are directly connected often to the price point, so that means that they don't want to charge when it's expensive because it makes no sense for the customer which by doing that, you're basically moving the charging times away from the peak
hours because they are represented in the price points. On top of that, the grid operators have created an API where you have the different layers of tariffs, so how much power they want to take out that specific hour, and you can also add that on top, so it says, even though it's cheap, don't go beyond this limit because then you will get higher grid fees. So that is
not dynamic at a moment. Hopefully it will be in the future, but now it's layers of tariffs and that is also digital, so you can add that on top. See and when I've done that, the customer really don't think about the charging or enership price anemorely a smart system at home or your charger, busy handles all that
kind of signals. And the same thing happened when the grid sense of flexibility, which can ask kill a lot of capacity or make a lot of capacity at one specific in overdoor area in the grid, and then the system will automatically then give that to us if they are part of that flexibility market.
So what you're really saying is digitalization is a critical part of this new I know you said this earlier on, but that's really what you're saying, and that's a very practical example of her. Right.
Absolutely, you talked about the operator not having these insights or the vision of what's really going on, and that's the whole point. Do you need information? It needs to be digitaled. You need to give the operators insight, not just with the customer. Of course their own equipment as well. So there's a lot of sensors getting out their cameras, monitoring temperatures, tons of information now being sent into operator which helped them to maneuver whatever goes on.
Can I ask if we talk about the transmission and the distribution group, right, TRANSMISSI gives obviously long distance and distribution grid the last mile. Right, What we see across most of Europe and the Western world is that we're very very good at the transmission level, and we're very good at seeing what's going on there and making sure the frequency stays and balance and all that type of stuff.
But I don't see that the distribution grid, And what I'm hearing from you is that actually Norway really is doing good job. Maybe just talk about the distribution transmission and how they work. Together and how you also see that there in the future.
Often we also talk about three layers. We also talked about the low the lowest one as well. That's also could be really hard to manage. The transmission part is important for us, especially in the area where I'm helping
at the moment. That's actually very interconnectors also comes into Norway South, part of Norway's the d SO needs to work really really close with the TSO or the dot net in Norway because you have hundreds of megawa is coming in from Europe and at the same time you have hundreds of megawads locally produced from higher power plants in our area, and at the same time you have data centers or industries within it. And then you have to push it towards the next region, towards us Law
or other parts of Norway. So we are helping are in between basically Europe and Norway at the same time, and then we have our own problems that in our regions. So there's actually right now going on project where we're trying to look into the regulatory issues where the d SO, the Distribusion Network actually getting more insight and more mandate to even better operate in between this landscape because normally
we had to rely totally on that part. But now I'm even even further into the big lines because just imagine shifting those amount of power from one hour on second to another. So yeah, it's troubling, but also it's easier where we here to manage many lays at the same time.
We talk about interconnector and sometimes they are a bit controversial, like they're going to increase prices or not. But overall, and that's our opinion here the increased residiency and we've seen them to restop the blackout in Spain. They were really critical last year. So what's your your inter connectors and should we be more interconnected? That's a very good question,
especially for the Innuisians at the moment. You're totally right, the interconnectors are not very popular in Norway at the moment, depending of course who you ask.
When the enershire prices went skyrocking few years back, the ordinary Norwisian were basically woke up. We taught electricity as cheap or even close to free, even though it wasn't. It was super cheap, even though we are fully electric,
especially on heating and also vehicles. We didn't see the problem with price points, and suddenly we got ten times or even twenty forty times higher prices three years back, and that's where everyone's starting to realize that electricity is something that we might not have as much as we were used to. We're used to exporting energy, not importing energy.
So there having a lot of controversy around it, and it ended up with the government in all Way basically splitting one year back in January February last year, and they were election year last year as well, so they basically created what they called the Norwegian Price, which is a flat price on all parts of Norway political set price. It's actually lower than the ACH so it's a no brainer for households, not businesses, but households to jump into
that agreement. And that was just for the politicians to try to stuff that discussion on interconnectors and energy price points because on an energy perspective, of course we need the interconnectors. We have too much production at the moment, you know, we need to share them with Swin, we
need to share them to Denmark, UK and EU. We want to help on the transition to the zero of low emissions, but at the same time, we can't forget that we also need to change our own industries and data centers also is now clean to play where the many data centers want to move to Norway because it is cheaper than many other European countries and it's also
a green hydro. So there is a huge concern both on the consumption of energy and Norway, but also the energy price is being moved over to especially the southern part of Norway. You can see on the prices last year and see that the South path of Norway were much higher than the rest of part of the Norway. So it's a huge different in offense south of norwegn prize points and of course interconnectors DESI is huge reason
to that. So yeah, it's a very controversial discussion and the politicians don't really dare to decide what to do with. For example, have a couple of connectors to Denmark that need to be renewed and they haven't really decided yet if they should because they know this is a political mindfield basically to discuss what to do with the cables.
Something that the Norwegian politician must have missed is the following when the cable with Scotland was put together. The plan was to export surplus hydro, but then the following into a twenty two other draught, so in fact you had to import. Now in order to import, GB had to run more gas plans. And where does the gas come from? Equinor Okay, the gas was expensive because Equino was charging a maximum and that's the year where they made more money than Saudi Aramco, but they didn't really
publicize it. So the Brits came to see the Norwegian and said, look, you want a cheaper power. You one hundred percent government owned. Why don't you talk to your colleague on the other side of the street, which one hundred percent government owned. So they reduced the price of the gas, so we can reduce the price of power and guess the lets say so read the regulation blah blah blah blah blah. So you're going to pay top
dollars for your gas, but we want chiap electrons. Excuse me, you need to tell your politician that they are hypocrites.
I'm so happy that you bring it up. First of all, Economy is not a fullyvernment owned company. It's only change. But yeah, yeah, is maorly owned by by the government. I would say that the politicians and Lada quite well, the problem wasn't at that point in not just the politicians,
it was the average person. Because just imagine being the Minister of Energy in no Way and we have all the people living in always saying that cut the interconnecting cables a sap and we don't want this expensive energy. And at the same time, as you mentioned, you have record income from EQUINOI and all the other companies paying
tax to Noway for gas and oil. So you were at the point where NOE earned more money than ever done before, not just oil and gas, but also on electricity, right because their high price of electricity made the hydropo brands and windmills better investment than any time. So the government were earning huge amount of money also some of the municipalities that owned the power plant, but the people living in Norway didn't see that income. They were actually
just paying more levels of energy. So the people in Norway were saying that we don't care that Noway is earning a lot of money in gas and oil and power because we are not. We are still paying the bill on all those energy resources same as others. And that's where the politician were standing in between their motors, and then when we have the election last year, that was exactly what happens. So you have a politicians trying to both say, we need the oil gas interconnectors, that's
a huge income. We also need the interconnectors on power. We cannot disconnect them. We also need to help Europe on both areas with energy. So it's not a political sense of stopping that, but I would rather say it was the politicians trying to tell the people who didn't know how it actually works, how do we solve this, And that's why they ended up making this fixed price.
And then magically, a few weeks later, no one talks about energy prices, you know, anymore in any households because they basically took the income from gas and power and subsidize then the consumption on top, and then suddenly the political debate change and now you can go back to brook as they normally did. So, yeah, that was a special moment. I remember, Gerard, I talk about that a few years back, so you're totally.
Right, Ronnie. I've got one more question, which is, as I look at the grids across the western world, the concern I have is the risks in and around an attack on the system, whether it's a transformer or a cyber attack or whatever it is. How do you look at those risks and how do you then make sure the system is really resilient if there is attack on something that is really critical.
That's a very hard discussion going on because just imagine trying to monitor every single component, not just as we try to do on the technical aspect, and now I was certainly adding a security layer on top of it. How do you do that? So there are many ways of doing that, but it comes down to the costs. You have to decide how how defensive can you be,
how quick you can respond. Then it all comes down to the cost of it and the cost of high security from threads that are beyond traditional cybersecurity that we
are used to. We have probably daily attacks, and we have had for decades, so that's not something new, but having external physical attacks is something very new, and that is going to be super hard because it comes down to you need to have a whole probably a whole new investment Burdshaed plan saying how do we monitor and how do we restore how to respond to threads that we are not used to. That is not weather or
components or cyber security threats. This is a discussion that is really going on, and of course I'm quite sure that most tzos in a way as elsewhere are having backdoor discussions as how should we respond to this and that scenarios. We even see it from the business aspect, and municipality is also calling the d S always saying that can we have meetings about that specific topic. What do we as a city do if we lose power all over in the city, you're parts of the city.
What do businesses do if that happened? What the hospitals do? You can just imagine all the meetings and discussions going on after the Ukraine situation in general that this is a topic, but it comes down to framework when it comes to investment, and it comes down to regultory framework on how could we try to use the purchase. We have to create more security for external threats and there is a lot of work to do there at the moment.
Sally, well, actually, I'm really glad that you guys are doing this because we don't really hear this in the media, and I know there's been a lot of concerns after this Berlin attack in particularly in the German market. But I'm glad this is happening because we need to do it. And I just want to thank you for coming on the show.
Thank you for inviting me.
Okay, Ron, what do you think?
Sorry, you just woked me up for the sleep. Too geeky for me, too geeky for you. I understand two geeky for you. But I think it's really critical.
I think we have to sort of face the reality large part of society is we're all dependent on electricity and the question is whether we have a resilient system or not, and I do not believe we do. And I think we just need to change the way we manage the system and how we recover from disasters. And that means you need to really refocus in and around what could go wrong and making sure that in the event of something happening, that, as I said, you can
recover really quickly. And I know that in certain circumstances we can't recover really quickly. And that's my concern.
My concern a much more down to us. My concern are coup of theft, because copper now has become so expensive that you've got gangs who are happy to steal the copper wires. Then drones, Oh yeah, if you look at the progress made because of the Russia Ukraine war, there's gonna be much more drones around and they're gonna be much more powerful couple roons. That's gonna increase risk.
Yeah, yes, you're absolutely right on the drones thing. I'm totally with you that my biggest concern is transformers, to be honest, just the need to make sure that we keep them on their very close scrutiny and then you also have backups for these critical transformers. That would be the way that the biggest concern I'd have. By the way, we're doing a very good job in terms of cybersecurity and stuff like that, because what you do pick up is here we are there are still daily attacks on
the power system across Europe. That's the reality. We don't talk about it anymore because it's been gone on for so long, but go to Ukraine and you see what a real war and also a critical infrastructure war is.
Like okay joah. So as we conclude, first we like to thank our guests Geeky and just to share with our audience that a few days ago we had the Amber Europe Atlecricity review came out. We can put a link in the show notes. There's a lot of great findings. But to summarize to twenty five, another record breaking for the EU Clean Energy Transition win and solar overtook for sil full generation for the first time. Yeah, it's really about solar. Solar group buy another twenty percent last year.
But a lot of other great stuff in that report.
Yeah, this solars unstoppable, you know, simplea starch.
It's just too cheap. Okay, yard, all right, pleasure to you next week, look forward.
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