Deploying solar and heat pumps in the residential sector is all well and good, but many attempts to scale have unfortunately failed. Beyond the king Octopus, Simon Phelan and his company Hometree have managed to become an unlikely challenger in the deployment of the Energy transition inside home. And Simon has achieved this feat by flipping the system onto his head. Hometree is a company that offers its customers home emergency breakdown insurance, plus installations and financing for energy eff...
Nov 25, 2024•31 min
Laurent goes live to Baku COP29 to discuss with Bruce “Almighty” Douglas, CEO Global Renewable Alliance and tireless promoter of Renewable Energy. He is the one who coins the famous “Triple Renewables” rallying cry, and has been rewarded by joining the precious list of TIME 100 Climate leaders. With Bruce, Laurent dives into COP. Shambolic, Rudderless and Essential nevertheless. The world of renewables is at the centre stage, dealing with diplomats who are doing politics without a calculator whi...
Nov 18, 2024•14 min
As COP29 begins, the ripple effects of the re-election of Donald Trump are reaching the shores of the Caspian Sea. COP28 welcomed 85,000 delegates, within which a significant contingent of Oil lobbyists. COP29 is supposed to be the “Finance COP”, whatever that means, but all major head of states will not participate. What to expect from COP29? Are COP still useful? Is it the correct format? Who is really committed and who is just paying lip service to fighting Climate Change? Those questions and...
Nov 11, 2024•29 min
First, Gerard is sorry, he couldn’t make it as he was on a ship in the Irish Sea, and his Starlink wouldn’t connect. So, it is just Laurent interviewing a young superstar, Peter Paul van Voorst, CEO of the mobile battery management platform Skoon. Skoon, based in Rotterdam, is now seven years old and manages more than 1,000 mobile batteries in 14 countries. Mobile batteries range from 1kw to 1MW and are either on trailers or inside 10ft containers. With Peter Paul, Laurent analyses this new segm...
Nov 04, 2024•26 min
Gerard and Laurent welcome Kristian Ruby, secretary general of Eurelectric, about their new report entitled “Power Barometer – Zeroing in on Electrification”. To quote the IEA, we enter in the “Age of Electrification” where electrification rate is going to accelerate significantly. We have an extensive conversation about the good news (growth of renewables, energy security progress in response to Russian aggression) and the not so good news (flat demand, as the new power usages – transportation,...
Oct 28, 2024•21 min
What are VPP? Virtual Power Plants. What are DER? Distributed Energy Resources? As the grid becomes more intermittent while the load is growing, those VPP/DER platforms provide a critical role by shedding demand, sometimes for a few minutes, to alleviate stress on the Grids. VPPs can avoid starting polluting peakers via pre-agreed and targeted demand reduction, shift consumption via batteries and even act in in Frequency response market. And System Operators are willing to pay a decent price to ...
Oct 21, 2024•29 min
While Gerard is doing his rock star concert at TedTalk Berlin, Laurent has invited an old friend, Roger Atkins, Top Voice on EVs to discuss the people behind the EV revolution. Roger has a 40 year career in the Auto industry (half of them in EVs) and his cowboy hat makes him a fixture of great EV shows around the world. Roger talk about his encounters with Robin Zeng - CEO CATL, Wang Chuanfu – founder BYD, Elon Musk, Jack Cheng - co-founder NIO, Bob Galyen – ex GM and CTO CATL, Li Shufu – founde...
Oct 14, 2024•19 min
The battery infrastructure is currently growing 3x faster than the solar industry. Records are beaten daily: in August 2024, for the first time, Chinese battery factories passed the 100GWh production mark. We are seeing industry giants consolidate their leadership while hopes of alternative technologies or promising start ups are being squashed. The prices are collapsing monthly, partly due to cheaper inputs, technological improvements and larger volumes, not dissimilar to what happened in recen...
Oct 07, 2024•26 min
Gerard is live on the Wisdom Tree Commodity Exchange podcast and delivers a masterclass on how to invest in the Energy Transition: Renewables, Equity, Innovation, Commodities. ----- Laurent will be keynote speaker at ReSource Amsterdam 24-25/10/24. Come say hello https://resource-platform.eu/events/re-source-2024-event/ ----- We also salute the latest edition of Mycle Schneider World Nuclear Industry Status Report. Essential to understand what is going on in the Nuclear Industry beyond the headl...
Sep 30, 2024•33 min
ExxonMobil forecasts 2050 Oil demand be the same as today. We believe that they are just “talking their books.” To discuss the future of the Energy system as well as the fight against Climate Change, we bring in a very respected expert and friend of the show: Kingsmill Bond, Energy Strategist at RMI. Kingsmill has been digging deep into the data and has realized that the fossil fuel cohort simply cannot fathom the speed of the Energy Transition. Gerard and Laurent have a lengthy debate about the...
Sep 23, 2024•25 min
As Europe has reached 270GW wind power (vs 150GW USA), corresponding to a value of 500bnEUR, we dig into the value of those assets. Gerard being out, Laurent brought his friend Mortimer Menzel, Managing Partner of Augusta Co, one of the most seasoned investment bankers in the wind sector. After describing the past gloom (interest rates, inflation, supply chain, Ukraine), we analyse the fundamentals of the market and turn out to be very optimistic for the years ahead, both onshore and offshore. M...
Sep 16, 2024•14 min
As wind and solar become ubiquitous, the value of hydropower goes up. Hydropower is becoming the ultimate clean energy, as it is flexible and easily dispatchable. Hydropower is concentrated in certain geographies (China, Brazil, Canada) and is almost entirely developed by State-Owned Utilities that can stomach and support the very long construction time. Bost costs and value should be measured in decades, not in years. Unfortunately, Climate Change is impacting the reliability of hydro; we have ...
Sep 09, 2024•30 min
“Summer has come and passed / The innocent can never last / Wake me up when September ends”. Like John Wick, Laurent thinks he is back. So we have a very energetic Minutes to start September. With Gerard, the co-hosts focus on one of the key trends of 2024 which they call “Batteries, the Great Consolidation”. A lot of great experts are helping shape our view. To name a few Aaron Wade, Tom Tsogt, Cormac O’Laoire, Christopher Chico, Chris Berry, Benchmark Minerals Intelligence/Rho Motion (Iola Hug...
Sep 02, 2024•12 min
How to decarbonise buildings? That’s an important topic because that sector accounts for 37% of all emissions, making it one of the three pillars of decarbonisation next to electricity generation and transportation. Progress has been mixed. If lighting is an incredible success, heating and cooling remain a complex proposition with certain countries adopting new technologies much faster than others. Energy efficiency is sometimes a hard sell, as pay back periods can be counted in decades. Energy ...
Aug 26, 2024•31 min
A special interview with one of the great minds of the Energy Transition. Dr. Doug Arent is the Executive Director of Strategic Public– Private Partnerships at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, U.S and Distinguished Fellow, World Economic Forum. He just published a book called “Our Renewable Energy Future: The Story of How Renewables will become the Basis for Our Lives.” “Our Renewable Energy Future” focuses on clean energy technology evolution and where our energy sy...
Aug 19, 2024•31 min
During Summer season, we bring you back the best of our sister show, Redefining Energy TECH, where host Michael Barnard invites Paul Martin for a very long and geekie conversation about innovative solutions for industrial heat. Two titans of our industry. Paul Martin, a seasoned chemical engineer, share his profound insights on the electrification of industrial heat processes. Here’s a brief summary of the conversation: The discussion kicked off with a critical analysis of the inefficiencies ass...
Aug 12, 2024•1 hr 30 min
In episode 143, Gerard, Laurent and Michael have discussed the philosophy of Bill Gates when it comes to the Energy Transition, and the root causes of his flawed thesis. Let see now if this transpires in his main investment vehicle, Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV). Michael Barnard is quite blunt: “To be clear, Gates is still highly resistant to the reality that we have almost all of the solutions we require, and that Breakthrough Energy Ventures is mostly invested in distractions.” As we are ...
Aug 04, 2024•19 min
Bill Gates is sucking a lot of oxygen in the Energy Transition. Is he a force for good, or a nuisance? What is his thesis and where does it come from? And is the thesis still valid in 2024 or obsolete? In this episode, we will not analyse Breakthrough Energy Ventures, his VC fund celebrating its 10th anniversary. That will be the topic of Episode 144, next week. Laurent, Gerard and Michael are going to analyse Bill Gates fascination for Vaclav Smil and David MacKay. We will dissect how their the...
Jul 29, 2024•20 min
This week, it is a solo by Gerard Reid. This is the audio of its remarkable presentation at EcoSummit Berlin in June 2024. The topic is “Batteries vs Hydrogen” Link to the YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAbr4byi414
Jul 22, 2024•16 min
Texas and California have witnessed a crazy growth in Solar and Batteries in recent years. In 2024 California has 24GW of Solar and 9GW of batteries on its grid; Texas has grown even faster with 31GW of Solar and 10GW of batteries. When it comes to the Energy Transition, you can make the following analogy: public policies are the land and financial markets are the rain. But the seeds are battle-hardened entrepreneurs. Laurent and Gerard love to invite such heroes of the development of Renewables...
Jul 15, 2024•29 min
After a crazy Intersolar in Munich which welcomed more than 120,000 visitors, the pace of Solar deployment in Europe is going exponentially. Gerard and Laurent bring in Walburga Hemetsberger, CEO of Solar Power Europe, to discuss the development of Solar, and through the new report “Mission Solar 2040”, how we are on the cusp of a Flexibility Revolution. The Report is available here: https://www.solarpowereurope.org/insights/thematic-reports/mission-solar-2040-1...
Jul 08, 2024•12 min
Glencore’s CEO Gary Nagle has once described ESG as “some person in the basement in office number 27 engaged in a box-ticking exercise.” And a lot of fossil fuel companies – while being less explicit – share the same opinion on ESG… and have voiced their hostility indirectly through complicit media outlets. The ESG movement is facing a significant backlash. On the one hand there has been too much greenwashing, on the other hand, ESG has become a political punching ball in certain US States depen...
Jul 01, 2024•31 min
We bring in Nick Wayth, CEO of Energy Institute (EI), for the release of the 73rd Edition of the Statistical Review of World Energy. The Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy™ analyses data on world energy markets from the prior year. Previously produced by bp, the Review has been providing timely, comprehensive and objective data to the energy community since 1952. The Strategic Review is now a collaboration between the EI, KPMG, Kearney and Heriot University. Five key stories eme...
Jun 24, 2024•15 min
UK is at the nexus of the subsea interconnector’s new economy. Great Britain is connected to Continental Europe by 8 interconnectors representing up to 15% of its power consumption. Subsea cables are now a growing industry because of the benefits they bring to the grids, such as resiliency, capacity, lower prices, and renewable energy balancing. Alongside batteries and pumped Hydro, interconnectors are the best flexible green infrastructure currently available on our road to net-zero. How has th...
Jun 17, 2024•28 min
Laurent interviews Georgios Stassis, PPC’S CEO, during Eurelectric Power Summit 24. PPC, the Greek Utility, is a remarkable turnaround story: from a soviet-style dinosaur a few years ago, PPC has become a thriving forward-looking profitable modern Utility. With Georgios, we discuss the investment in renewables, the phase out of lignite, digitisation, the investment in new segments (Datacenters, E Mobility, Demand Response…) and share an overview of regional integration with interconnectors and t...
Jun 10, 2024•18 min
In April, we did Ep129 Minutes about China and announced the interview with a real expert. Here it is. With David Fishman, an American based in Shanghai, we dig deep into China’s Energy Transition. We try to reconcile the rise of renewables and the rise of coal use. We try to decipher what is decided locally and nationally. We investigate what is the result of command-and-control measures vs market forces. We cover wind, solar, batteries, EVs. Our goal is not to give good points or bad points, o...
Jun 03, 2024•30 min
Last week, Laurent was in Athens for the spectacular Eurelectric Summit (we will talk more about it in 2 weeks’ time, with a special Episode) meanwhile, we bring in our friend Jan-Michael Hess, organiser of the Berlin EcoSummit 4-5 June to discuss Clean Tech and his annual gathering of more than 100 Start-Ups and hundreds of investors. If you don’t have your tickets (yet) https://ecosummit.net/
May 27, 2024•8 min
"McKinsey, BCG and S&P Global Commodity Insights project electricity demand tied to data centers to increase at a CAGR of 15% through 2030." “Booming AI demand threatens global electricity supply (FT)”. Media and consultants have recently raised the alarm about the unquenchable energy thirst of AI and datacentres. Can we believe those predictions or is it another scaremongering wave like we saw 15 years ago, when prophets predicted that the internet would soon consume 50% of the world power?...
May 20, 2024•30 min
We bring in the star of the week, Ember’s Dave Jones, to discuss the Global Electricity Review 2024, published last week. Main take aways (thank you Nat Bullard): Renewable sources (hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, biomass) are now 30% of global electricity supply. Solar generation increased 23% yoy; wind 10%. Fossil fuel generation increased 0.8%. If not for a decline in hydro production, renewables would have met almost the entirety of the global increase in electricity demand. We are entering ...
May 13, 2024•11 min
Distribution grids are facing new challenges. On the one hand, they experience a growth of local demand, with EV charging, heat pumps and datacenters. On the other, they must accommodate with the fast deployment of decentralised energy such as rooftop solar and batteries. How to reconcile those challenges while maintaining grid stability? And how can Utilities, hooked up on rates and CAPEX start thinking differently and adopt new technologies? Beyond the regulatory changes and technical investme...
May 06, 2024•32 min
