Belén Gallego 0:43
Welcome ladies and gentlemen to this online session and good morning good afternoon to you depending where you’re based. I just want to let you know that we are going to wait one more minute for people to join the session and then we will begin. And in the meanwhile, it’s really just one minute this is not not it’s not it’s literally one minute. So I invite you to use the chat to introduce yourself your company and make sure that you actually tag all panelists and attendees so we can all see you. Thank you very much and we will begin very soon.

Good morning. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, this is the session where we are looking into a very specific topic, which is maximizing and optimizing performance of renewable energy through using either any software type smart technology and energy storage systems so that you can actually have more control of what your actual assets are doing in one. And with us today. We have two super speakers from were cylinder going to tell us about a solution for this. And I’m going to mute you young. Let me see if I can unmute you. You’re gonna have to mute yourself. Could you please introduce yourself?

Unknown Speaker 2:39
Thank you. Yes. Yun Anderson, I’m Mr. Market Development Manager for Bharat Silla based in in Helsinki, Finland. I’m looking after our market development activities in in Europe, especially in Germany or UK. So a lot of taking an insight into what is happening in the future, trying to To promote and and make our customers business better and and make more money for our customers.

Belén Gallego 3:09
Thank you very much, john, and you are today. Where are you joining us from today?

Unknown Speaker 3:14
I’m actually joining, joining from my summer cottage so I’m out in the archipelago at my seaside office. I’m very privileged to be so so

Belén Gallego 3:24
in Finland, right in Finland, still Finland see so I’m in Madrid. So you see that this is a very international group here, just like the people in the audience and look, please could you unmute yourself and introduce yourself?

Unknown Speaker 3:36
Yeah, hi, I’m Luke Whitmer

Unknown Speaker 3:40
General Manager of data science in Word Scylla in the energy storage and optimization business unit. It’s really great to see everybody saying hi from all around the world in the chat system. UK Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Albania, UAE all over so yeah Really great to see everybody coming in. Looking forward to sharing what we can today. I’m in the US near Washington, DC. I know everybody has probably seen some crazy things in the news. I’m safe. I live outside the city in the suburbs. But everybody’s you know, continued thoughts and prayers for everything going on here in the US is appreciated.

Belén Gallego 4:23
Thank you very much. Look, we will probably all thinking that I’m sure there is also someone there from from the US, but there is definitely people from everyone. So this is great. Welcome, everyone. All right. So this is how it’s gonna work today. And for many of you who are already familiar with us, you really know how it goes. But yeah, I’m going to present first, then we’re going to have a presentation from from look, and then we’ll take the questions thereafter. However, we have special surprises that a Dan is actually going to show us like a modeling type device. I let him do the talking. Of course, he’s the one who understands, but if you have any questions about that, make sure that you put them all in the q&a and Not in the chat, because the chat we use for other things in the q&a allows us to actually go through the questions a little bit more organized more in a more organized fashion. So, Dan, go ahead, could you please share your screen? And let’s get this done. And if you have any specific questions for you, and just just put them in the q&a, and then we’ll get through to that. And in the meanwhile, just remind you guys, we are recording this session, and you wouldn’t have access to all the materials in the recordings. Go ahead, john, you can start talking.

Unknown Speaker 5:31
Yes. Thank you. You don’t go site. So I hope you got my screen. Yeah, yes, that’s what you should see then. Excellent.

Unknown Speaker 5:41
So I will just

Unknown Speaker 5:44
a que tu

Unknown Speaker 5:51
T, just Google and Edie transitional lab and this takes you to develop Sylla site.com and it takes you directly to tool developed by us. And this is this is a tool that we that we started to develop to take a closer look and to understand what what is happening to the European electricity market in response to the COVID-19 situation and what that actually means for for the energy systems in Europe. Everything in here is based on on free and available data. So there is no no proprietary data here. And there’s a lot of interesting stuff here a lot of videos a lot of insights and stuff and if you scroll down, you actually come to their transition lab itself. I will put this in into full screen mode to to be easier to show. And what we actually are seeing here Yes, let me so this is this is not data from Europe. This tool does is that it compares data from 2020 with the same days and same time of 2019. So it’s comparing 2018 2019 to 2019 2020 to 2019. Sorry. And it shows how the COVID-19 has impacted on energy consumption, energy generation, how different countries are coping with that situation. We see a lot of stats here on the left. And then we see on the on the right here we see the top 10 renewable days and these are now for the whole of Europe. So may 24. This year, Europe hit 55% renewables penetration, so they can as a whole, we are already about 50% and the top 10 days this year has been all over 50%. And that’s that’s amazing to see. But we also see for Europe as a whole, this is now from beginning of January. So if I, if I drag this slider here to, to start from from, let’s say February when the when the corona virus actually started to hit more, more and more VC that the actual load from beginning of February, February until today

Unknown Speaker 8:24
is down by 6.6%

Unknown Speaker 8:27
while the share of renewables in our power mix is up by 7%. So this is actually showing us now, a glimpse of the future. I mean, we are day by day year by year we are building more renewables and we should do so and this thing the 7.7 7.5% renewable share up is what we would expect to see in in in three, four or five years maybe. So this is actually a snapshot on on that The future that we have the opportunity to take now with with this situation at the same time we can take a look at Europe here now cogeneration is down by 30% Way to go for for for the renewable targets. This is an amazing achievement. And, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff here. So if you then click on another country if you hover over a country or you see a quick stats of of Germany, for example, you can then drill drill through but if you click on Germany, it highlights Germany and we see the same stats for for Germany for example. And the top 10 days for Germany, or close to 80% even and I will drill down drill down to April 21. Later on and take a closer look on what actually happened on that day. But we also see the same kind of trends in Germany. Lotus down, renewable share is up 10% Gold generation is down almost half. And the very interesting thing actually is that we look on on electricity pricing, it’s down by almost half. And this is this is putting this is of course putting a big strain on on traditional base load generation. And that is also why we see coal generation go down, because it’s it’s not feasible to run baseload coal generation on very low prices. So if we, if we drill down to Germany, for example, here, we go down to Germany and then we come to another page here, I will click on the overview to start with So here we see the the overview stats, most of the same stats that we had on the on the first page, but with a little bit more, more detail. We see here the generation mix on on on the left, I total load and then we have generation by production time below here. But if you take a look at the total load, I will open this up a little bit more to see more closely what is happening here. So, this is now showing I will I will click on the on the blue dotted line and this is the blue dotted line here that is last year’s electricity load. So the load on the German system and if we then compare that to the total load for this year, we see that the total load has actually dropped quite heavily. And we see it starting here from from mid March something and that’s when the crisis really hit Germany and then the lockdown started to happen and after that, it has gone down. And and we see these are By the way, by the way, the weeks we see here so it is the middle of the week and then the the bottoms here to truths are on weekends, as it usually goes a weekends have lower electricity consumption as us industry is closing down for the week and then it’s starting up again on Monday. So, you actually see the the weeks in the system and we see here how the cold situation has impacted on the electricity consumption. So, it is visible on countries how this The Coronavirus has has impacted on the power system.

Unknown Speaker 12:26
If you take a look at

Unknown Speaker 12:29
I go to the dispatch system dispatch page here and if we take a look at Germany as such, so this is now showing the dispatch of the German system hour by hour how it really was. You see here now in the in the bottom we have the nuclear we have hydro we have coal, and then on the top here we have light green, we have wind and then the yellow is is solar. And we see in the beginning of the period here it’s it’s still February, so it’s The solar is not generating that much due to the winter season. But the further towards the spring and summer summer we get the more and more we see of solar generation and on a highly high level look everything looks looks very fine here and there is no big issues. But if you start to drill down let’s let’s take the one of the top, top days here I will move the slider to April April 20 and 21st so take a take 919 and then I take the slider down to April 22. me take it to 21st so 22nd that so here we have now April 21. One off the top renewable days in German and you see we have a we have a massive solar peaky peak here in the middle of the day. We have a lot of wind coming in. It was a windy week apparently in Germany and good sunshine and we see here, middle of the day. In Germany, we see a renewable generation of 84% penetration. You see a total load of 65 gigawatts, and the generation was actually 82 gigawatts, so not really matching there. And the interesting thing, what we see here is that we see that the day ahead pricing in the, in the, in the box down the middle of the screen, it hits minus 84 euros per megawatt hour. And we see that also down in the in the graph here on the bottom, the day ahead price throughout the whole whole solar peak almost we have hugely negative prices in Germany. And also we look at at the cross border trading, a lot of export is happening so Germany is actually pushing a lot of Electricity across borders to their neighbors. And at the same time, they have to pay the neighbors to take the electricity of them. This is very much showing on the inflexibility that we see in the bottom of of a lot of power systems that that the the coal generation that is still online here, the gas generation that is still online, they can’t switch off they need to be running in order to provide electricity during the nighttime hours. So, this is this is one one key takeaway that we see that there is inflexibility in the system. There is also of course, many of you will argue that that inflexibility is not the only only reason why these power plants are actually running here but they are needed for for keeping the the system stable under keeping the grid running and Luke will come back to that and have very interesting insights. into into new technologies for doing that. So if we look here, still on this graph here, we see that the D load is now 63 gigawatts. And if you look at the solar and and wind, it amounts to over 60 gigawatts of generation during the middle of the day here, meaning that Germany actually could have been powered by renewables only during these days. And the same, the same actually goes for a lot of lot of other days during the, that these periods. So it’s it’s really interesting to see that, that even though even though a country could be powered by by renewables only, we we are still not there. We are not the systems are not ready to cope with this kind of situation. So we see if we drill down to the Import Export here In the middle of of of April 21, Germany is exporting a lot of power to the neighboring countries. And as I said, as the power price is negative they also has to pay the other countries to take the the electricity away from from them so this is this is really interesting stats that we can see

Unknown Speaker 17:24
if we go back up to the European level we can take another look on another country here I will drag the sliders for for the days again so let’s let’s take a look at Italy for example Italy has now been been let’s call it the poster child for

Unknown Speaker 17:44
for Corona lock downs.

Unknown Speaker 17:47
And if we go to the overview again to see the load load occur so if we look at the Italian load here, same curve again, the dotted blue line is last year. I will highlight that by Clicking on it here. This is the last year data the last year load. And if you look at the total or the load for for this year, we see a tremendous drop here in beginning of March when the lockdown hits, hits in northern Italy, and it’s, it’s now in the in the last weeks it’s starting to, to come up towards normal levels again, but it’s still impacting on the load. So this is really interesting and we see the same kind of trends. For for the for the dispatch as well in Italy, we see an increasing share of renewables, but we also see that gas let me go to let me go to to this, this one here and zoom in on Italy because this is we have easier to see numbers here. So we see that that gas generation coal generation is all down and day ahead prices are all down However, if we if we look at on a weekly basis, we see that gas generation is actually making up quite a lot of of the gaps between renewables on everything else. So even though the gas generation is down, it is taking, taking the intermediate role there in Italy quite a lot. I can still maybe maybe take you to Spain, as well, to take another country in Europe. And I do encourage everybody online here to take a closer look. This is open to everybody I said. So just just I’ve been enter the transition lab in Google and you will find this page. So if we go to Spain here, again, the same kind of trends, a load is down renewable, so cogeneration is down prices are down all of that we see the very same kind of things.

Unknown Speaker 19:57
If we take a closer look at Spain here, so

Unknown Speaker 20:01
Let’s start from from beginning of April, February, we see that German the current course of time here, nucleus is actually the one that has been taking been taken offline and reducing load and that is nucleus then giving giving space and giving room for for more windows all our generation in the power system. So, that is that is another another observation here that that, again inflexible baseload generation is giving way for for renewable and variable generation Import Export. This is quite interesting if we if we take a look at

Unknown Speaker 20:48
the Import Export here.

Unknown Speaker 20:52
Spain is both importing and exporting and we can see in in during many times and many hours of the day and the weeks. We see that Spain is importing a lot of energy from France and then exporting it directly to Portugal. So actually it is Portugal it is importing their energy from France during a lot of hours. And that is a quite interesting observation we can see here as well, the same kind of thing we see with prices. We don’t see heavily negative prices here, because the price is not allowed to go negative as far as I know in Spain. And that’s why we see that the price is actually it’s hitting a very low of one euro two euros several times during during this this crisis situation. So by drilling drilling down into this kind of data here, we actually start to see issues and troubles that are coming along with reduced load and with increasing renewables. And this is, as I said, this is what we expect to see in five years time maybe when when we have built, built renewables in greater detail and greater amounts into the into the power system. And I truly believe that this is this is actually showing us the issues and the challenges that we have today in order to integrate and utilize renewables into the into to a higher degree. And there are very interesting and and good technology, technological advancements that are helping us to do this in the future. And, and I think by this I will leave the world over to Luke and he can then explain in more detail, what are the new and interesting things that we could take take forward to make our our power systems even greener than the US and actually reach this. This holy grail of 100% renewable energy Power Systems.

Unknown Speaker 23:01
Thanks, john. Don’t Don’t stop sharing it. Keep it up for a minute. There’s a few questions. I wonder if Do you want to just answer live briefly? Absolutely. Yes. A couple of them I think are quite simple. One was what’s the color code of each country mean? I don’t know if it’s just random.

Unknown Speaker 23:18
So, if we look on the map, I believe I believe we are talking about this here. Yeah. So this is this is the color coding is is the amount of renewables and ultra renewable generation in that country. So that is that is going according to, to renewable share.

Unknown Speaker 23:35
Yeah, great. Another one was related to import exports, the one in Germany, which countries in the EU do you think are benefiting most from Germany’s negative pricing?

Unknown Speaker 23:48
Interesting thing, what we can see if we, if we drill down to the dot one.

Unknown Speaker 23:59
Let me know I think I will. These are questions I have

Unknown Speaker 24:01
to so that’s why I’m asking. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 24:05
Very good. So you let me take the fall here. Excellent. So if we drill down here and take a closer look, so we have Germany, which I did right in the middle of, of the continent, and you have Germany has a lot of connections everywhere. So Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland. And what we can see here is is that during Let me see here is, let me take that that specific day again, so 21st of

Unknown Speaker 24:39
April

Unknown Speaker 24:42
21 of April Here we see the export in greater detail. So it is actually exporting to all of these countries. It’s exporting to, to all the all the other sides of the country. And interesting thing also is that it’s exporting Denmark and from Denmark it actually goes all the way out to to Norway. So if we click on Norway here and we drill down on Norway, we should actually see that Norway should be importing as well from Denmark because I’m extent during some wars. So Norway and Denmark are actually actually benefiting quite a lot Norway can can save on their hydro quite a lot. They don’t need to run their hydro, but they can actually save it for later and dispatches them to Central Europe at a later later time. We also see a lot of power go into Poland, a lot of power go into France. We know of course, that France is is has a very big share of nuclear and it’s not always easy for France to to to regulate downwards and take that On the same goal for Poland, there’s a lot of coal generation in Poland and it’s quite inflexible. What I understood from before as well is that a lot of power actually goes from Northern Germany to Poland to the neighboring countries and are entering back again in southern Germany. So, Germany can also be utilizing the neighboring countries for for shifting energy from north to south. And that is then due to internal transmission constraints from on the north south line. So these are the kind of interesting things as well. Excellent question, by the way.

Unknown Speaker 26:38
Yeah, I really liked that chart when you had so many countries Um, so I guess we um, I can take over there’s still lots more questions more came in as

Unknown Speaker 26:49
you can maybe start typing somewhere.

Unknown Speaker 26:52
I will I will start typing Yes.

Belén Gallego 26:55
You can. You can also I was telling you before, you know, just have that handy in case you needed later in the explanations, but I think a lot of the questions are repeating themselves. So look, actually let me you need to share screen right. I think Yon has to

Unknown Speaker 27:09
stop, right? Yep.

Belén Gallego 27:10
Yo, you can go ahead now.

Unknown Speaker 27:12
Okay. I’m

Belén Gallego 27:15
not 14 open.

Unknown Speaker 27:18
Okay. Very good.

Belén Gallego 27:22
Right. Go ahead. We can see your

Unknown Speaker 27:26
because your screen perfectly

Unknown Speaker 27:27
Great. Okay.

Unknown Speaker 27:31
So thank you. Yon. Thank you everybody for the good questions coming in. What I want to focus on a little bit next is some of the projects we’ve done in terms of supporting higher renewable penetration. So as john mentioned, when he was looking at Germany, that there was some thermal baseload left running there’s two main reasons that it gets left Running, and arguably even a third one. So I’ll just mention them briefly. One is that it’s needed for the night and it’s too short a time maybe for six hours that you would need to shut it down. And then it would have to start back up again that those types of inflexible plants can’t, can’t do that the starting and stopping costs are too high. And it’s makes more economic sense to push through or it might even be really not not technologically feasible with whatever’s installed at those older plants. The second one is, as john mentioned, stability of the system. So those systems are providing some type of frequency and especially voltage control, they’re forming the grid. You can’t even have a grid without that rotational inertia without those spinning plants and then third is for security of supply spinning reserves. So the idea that if some of those renewable plants have some type of issue and trip offline that you need to have something there that can suddenly increase its output to prevent some type of brownouts or even cascading blackouts across some part of that country or Europe. So, those those three reasons are really why you see that type of baseload. Even when there’s so many renewables, causing negative prices, all of these services, having technology that can start up and shut down quickly and having grid stability, ancillary services frequency and voltage support and even virtual synchronous generation from batteries that is providing grid forming capability

Unknown Speaker 29:58
and

Unknown Speaker 30:00
The last one of spinning reserves, being able to immediately replace some other asset that trips offline can all be provided by battery systems and fast ramping engines as we transition to cleaner fuels, especially that would support higher renewable penetrations. And so I’ll talk a little bit through this presentation about one of the software platforms that is a main control center inside of our word Silla

Unknown Speaker 30:34
product stack.

Unknown Speaker 30:37
And this is just a diagram showing some of the configuration that we have done with our gems software power plant controller, where we control multiple power plants simultaneously. Effectively what our product does in our island projects, which is what I’m going to be talking about in a little bit. is full dispatch and control optimization with an awareness of these costs and requirements with an awareness of all three of those aspects, whether it’s a starting and stopping timing requirements that a plant, if it shuts down has to be down for at least two hours or whatever it might be, that there’s a battery, or that even those the engines are providing primary response that they’re the grid forming entities that if those assets trip offline, they must be replaced as quickly as possible to maintain the security of supply and that there’s enough spinning reserves that if any single biggest piece your biggest coal plant your biggest thermal plant, trips offline and has some issue, that there’s enough participating assets, whether it’s energy storage, or engines or a combination of those two step in immediately uncover that that loss So there have been a couple of projects which we’ve tackled, which are small compared to Europe. But the technology has been proven and continues to grow. orders of magnitude in terms of the deployments each year, where we are pushing the renewable penetrations further and further with arguably, smaller batteries than we did at first. So in the beginning, which I’ll talk about on the next slide, there was a battery system on the island that was more than enough to even cover the whole load. And that’s not realistic for Europe, for Europe, battery technologies are being installed more and more. But they’re not going to be replaced at a level where the whole grid can be carried by batteries. And so this project here in the Caribbean is really relevant because it’s a small battery. It’s a six megawatt battery on an 18 megawatt grid. And so here the battery is big enough to cover a loss of half of the wind farm at any time as well as a loss of each of the large engines and anytime so it’s sized for that spinning reserve application. And it’s a grid forming battery. So it can start up like a UPS it can, it can bring up the whole grid all by itself. And then once that grid is up, then you can synchronize other assets to it. So it’s the same as like any type of thermal spinning plant, it’s providing virtual synchronous generation. So it’s forming that grid, it’s running in parallel with the engines. And it responds very fast. With sub sub second sub sub cycle. So within a few kilohertz, it’s already going to be dynamically adapting and starting to output power when the frequency starts to dip. What we see in Europe is is that thermal plants get left on to create this voltage to create the potential difference, so that the grid can even exist. And if more and more batteries can be brought onto the grid, then the grid can be formed by those batteries and the renewables can flow freely. And so our project that was completed last year in the Azores

Unknown Speaker 34:30
right off the coast of Portugal there as part of Portugal

Unknown Speaker 34:34
is 100%, renewable capable that we can switch off the thermal generation completely and form the grid with the batteries in virtual synchronous generation mode so that those engines can come and go from the grid as they please, that there’s always a voltage and a frequency to synchronize to. This is a really important piece of that puzzle is having that type of technology So just diving in real quick to a little bit of technical detail, this may be too technical for some of you, but I hope that I am able to explain it in a way that helps demystify some of the electrical engineering complexities that are going on under the hood. So effectively, there’s two main dimensions there’s real power, which is shown here on this x axis. And there’s reactive power, which is shown here on the y axis. Every grid has two things voltage and frequency. Frequency is effectively the pulse of the grid, and voltage is effectively the blood pressure. You can think of all the transmission lines as pipes, the energies flowing through them. And you need both of these without the potential difference without the blood pressure, the blood won’t flow from one point to another. Without that pulse, the free See, you don’t have that inertia that ability for the system to actually maintain and remain electrified. And so, historically, we would have been in this number one area, which is shown by two different dots, the orange ones represent sorry for the little bit of confusion here, maybe the legends just shows that this left half of the circle is consumption. So, the negative loads are consumption and the green side is generation and so, this is the, this depicts the operating region of everything. So generation is always going to be on the right here. And so, historically, when there were not very many renewables, there was a lot of thermal generation. So this orange one right here shows that there was most of the real power would have been produced by the thermal plants 90% or so. And all of the reactive power required would have come from those thermal plants, early renewable plants didn’t produce much reactive power, if any. And so thermal existing thermal plants would have had a reduction in power factor quality, and they would have had to produce some of that reactive power. But over time, renewable plants began to be specified in a way where they had to at least provide unity power factor. So as time went on, we see these thermal plants Oops, sorry, I didn’t mean to go forward continue to produce less real power, so it shifts from one to two here. Meanwhile, the renewables are producing more power, they’re, they’re producing a little bit more reactive power. So two is a little bit lower than one but they’re not often producing a lot of reactive power to actually support the grid in any way. And then three would be where, where things are moving to where more and more of no plant renewable plants are, and battery systems are being specified to actually produce reactive power proportional to their real power generation. So in line with the power factor and so that really helps because now these renewable plants that are generating have to produce a whole bunch of reactive power as well. And today, that’s what’s happening a lot across Europe is that those renewable plants are producing a lot of reactive power as well, to serve the reactive load needs. Reactive loads are like spinning motors, compressors, air conditioners, things like that. And we’re where we really need to get to with Europe is this number four, where we’ve gotten to on our on some of our projects and where we have technology in terms of battery inverters that are forming the grid. You’re not necessarily getting the reactive power from those batteries, but they’re the thing that’s actually producing the grid and is able to output P and Q real and reactive power. And that’s what enables you is when you have renewables, plus battery in Green at this for that renewables plus battery are producing all the P and all the Q that you need together. That’s when that enables you to actually shut the engines off at number four. Otherwise, your thermal plants, turbines and engines remain trapped up here at this three because they can’t go below their minimum loading. They have some minimum loading, call it 30%. And they can’t push lower than that. And so you have to keep them running just to provide the reactive power support.

Unknown Speaker 39:33
And the grid is hovering, you know, somewhere between this two in this three, based on the minimum loading on the real power and dimension here. So, so hope that wasn’t too technical, and I hope that that helped a little bit, but it’s effectively the fact that those thermal plants can’t go to zero when a battery can and then even when the battery is at zero loading, it can still Produce reactive power to keep the grid up as it needs to. And so here I just share an example from our a source project where, again, loads are very low compared to mainland Europe. But the reality of having volatile renewables and a battery that is dynamically stepping in to fill the gap, the battery is in green wind is blue, yellow solar. And this is just a one hour view. Brown is a thermal plant an engine that gets turned on once the renewable forecast has come down, and that battery has been used for that loss of wind scenario. And this whole time, this exact same hour, the grid frequency is very stable and flat, and the voltage is very stable and flat because that battery is providing all three of those services that we talked about in the beginning that it’s stepping in to fill the gap whenever it needs to and balancing the grids. So We can have those engines completely off.

Unknown Speaker 41:05
Just as a brief

Unknown Speaker 41:08
and ending note before we go to all the QA, this is just a few minutes snapshot when the batteries during one of the maintenance periods when we had them disconnected from the grid and then reconnected them to the grid, you can see a difference in the frequency quality. The batteries in grid forming mode, virtual synchronous generation, add a lot of stiffness to the grid. And so you can see that while the engines are oscillating around once those batteries join, they’re very fast and lightweight and responsive. They don’t have the actual inertia of an engine, but they create synthetic inertia that’s actually cleaner and smoother than a thermal spinning plant can provide. And you can see that evidenced here in the data by itself.

Unknown Speaker 41:54
So I think I think with that

Unknown Speaker 42:00
We can go to q&a.

Belén Gallego 42:03
Can you stop sharing? Oh, let me let me do that for you. Okay,

Unknown Speaker 42:07
no problem. Oh, perfect.

Belén Gallego 42:08
Yeah, and I’m gonna open your microphone. Now. You’re gonna have to open it yourself again. Oh, yes. So you’ve been you’ve been busy. But still, you know, you’re just managing to keep up with demand. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 42:21
I can’t I can’t answer all the questions that are coming. A lot of questions, a lot of excellent questions as well. So keep keep them coming.

Belén Gallego 42:29
Is there anything that you need to show again? Or is there any question that you’d like to show the graphs for? Can we do without the graphs again?

Unknown Speaker 42:37
I think we can do it without the graph.

Belén Gallego 42:39
Okay. Okay. Would you like to start with any specific things you were looking at? Otherwise? We’ll just read a few from them.

Unknown Speaker 42:45
I have the add a question answer box opening so I can I can take one here. What happens to the system when no country can import? I think you’re cuckoo, and also I’ve got that given, give an answer to that as well. That is an So one question and I think that is a thing that we most likely will see more and more of in the future. I mean, if you look at a lot of country plans and National Energy and Climate plans, countries are talking about that we have the interconnectors, to neighboring countries to export and to give some flexibility to our power systems. However, when we go forward into the future, and we have a lot of renewables, and we have our annual baseload, we will for certain certain run into the situation that we have a lot of wind we have a lot of solar and we have more energy than we need. And also, if we have that, our neighbors most likely have the exact same situation. If it’s sunny here, it’s most likely sunny on the other side of the border as well and they have the same kind of issue so nobody can really import. And this is, this is a situation that either you start to curtail, so you reduce the generation from wind and solar. And that we of course, we don’t want to do that. So one thing is what what we’ve been talking about energy storage, of course, we can store it for later use. But I would also say that we need to start looking to other other technologies, other ways of utilizing this energy, free energy, by the way, and that would be sector coupling and turning into charging our electrical vehicles, turn it into synthetic fuels, turn it into heat, if you are living in in northern country where you need heating or turning into air conditioning and cooling your houses if you’re living in a hotter country. These are the kinds of things that we need to start to look into more and more.

Unknown Speaker 44:40
Luke, do you want to add on that? No, I think that’s fine. Yeah.

Belén Gallego 44:47
There was another one in the case of Germany, why the renewable, the renewables are not switched off to avoid negative export.

Unknown Speaker 44:56
Duffy’s, that is of course, due to the fact that renewables are Have grid priority. So renewables are have access to the grid automatically. So they they don’t need to, to modify their generation. They they just generate and they export everything to the grid. While the then the transmission system operators need to make sure that the grid is stable that you don’t that you have the balance in the system, and that actually leads to the negative pricing so that renewables have grid priority, actually, and that is that is the reason why, and I still believe it. Based on the answer that I for the previous question, I think renewables should have green priority.

Belén Gallego 45:40
I think the EU has announced that they’re going to take that away. They add the ability to give any priority.

Unknown Speaker 45:47
That is Yeah, that is probably probably being discussed. Yes. I still hope that that it will be kept him in this in this very, very way anyhow, of course during emergency situations. You would have a very unstable system. If you would not curtail them, of course, yes, you need to curtail and end up in that instance for sure.

Belén Gallego 46:08
My understanding is that it was a more political matter. So they took away the ability to prioritize any specific sources, but because I don’t know enough about it, then that I better not add anything here, but I’m sure someone in the audience knows. And if you do know, the story, feel free to send it through the chat.

Unknown Speaker 46:24
I think I think the reason that it’s it’s hard is because someone has a PPA and they’ve agreed to some price and off take and you can’t, it’s a contractual agreement. So curtailment is one of those things where it has to be in the PPA, you have to reserve the right to curtail somebody ahead of time.

Belén Gallego 46:43
And how does more of that some of the red countries what they were prioritizing coal. So the only way to stop that was to take away the ability to prioritize any source of energy specifically, I think it was something along the lines, but anyway, I don’t know the topic in detail.

Unknown Speaker 46:58
Yeah. So There’s a question from Ignacio. Why scenario thermal one pet real power is not 100% it was a long time ago, but I didn’t want to put it all the way there because for a long time, we’ve had a few percent renewables, which are growing rapidly. So I put it less than hundred percent, but it could be it was what you know, even I would say maybe it never was. There’s always been hydro, geothermal, other things like that. So it depends what you put in that bucket.

Unknown Speaker 47:27
Just there’s another

Belén Gallego 47:29
Sorry, that was repeated several times and bit about doesn’t reflect the changes between Spain and Morocco. The

Unknown Speaker 47:37
I was I was actually typing an answer to that. So excellent that you brought that up? Yes, the Spain Morocco interconnector that is a vital one and I know that there is a lot of energy change going from Spain to Morocco. The reason why this is not reflected yet is that this information is not directly available from from them. So we link we need to look into how to import it. In a good way in in there and of course, we need to draw a line somewhere where we where we just copy data otherwise we will have the whole globe.

Belén Gallego 48:07
So far you have just this Europe European

Unknown Speaker 48:10
court for a moment we have only Europe and that is of course huge reason that that we are getting this data free data free for everybody. So, we are just this is not our data. We are we are getting this data and we are just putting it into a visual format that you can actually crawl it look at it in an easy and analyze

Belén Gallego 48:29
it easily. Sorry, I interrupted you look, I also wanted to give you some time to take a look at

Unknown Speaker 48:36
I think

Unknown Speaker 48:39
I want to answer this question briefly from Julian.

Unknown Speaker 48:44
Let’s see here answer live. Can you explain how which steps work? psyllid gems works in a typical project of renewable energy mainly solar and wind. Yeah, so we can work as a company word Scylla. We can work with you to find Solar and wind are vendors that you could partner with. At the same time, you can go shop for those technologies yourself. Since we don’t sell wind and solar, for the most part, there are projects where we have wrapped the the solar components. So if you want a fully integrated system with battery and solar from one provider, we can subcontract that solar part out underneath of us as needed. But most of our projects, our customers have procured or are in the process of procuring those renewables completely separately. And there’s simply a control scope within our contract to control those renewables. And so we have a requirements document to provide to that vendor in terms of what types of interface and set points we’ll need to be able to set. And that that’s all you know, work through during that contracting period. I think that answers that question

Belén Gallego 50:04
just keep going if you like with with you guys, there is a lot of other new questions that that are coming in. As it happens, it says For example, how do you split to solve the legal constraints DSO D so they can own storage assets. This is a problem in Spain Actually, there isn’t such a thing as a store. So yeah, you’re gonna work around this.

Unknown Speaker 50:33
Yeah, we’ve seen it in a few places globally. In Texas here in the US, there was a ruling recently where

Unknown Speaker 50:42
energy storage was deemed.

Unknown Speaker 50:47
I actually forget which side it fell on. I think it was deemed not a generation asset. So it was deemed a transmission and distribution asset so it had to fall that side and that was frustrating for some people because then you couldn’t participate doing energy arbitrage and things With the battery in the generation side, so we’ve seen other examples, though of it done right. So, you know, if you look at California and you look at Australia all of the market rules are are such that any asset can if they qualify for the for the for the for what’s actually required in terms of producing electricity. So, you can register as a generation asset and you actually in Australia register as a separate load asset and so, your one battery has to register as two different market and market facing entities that get bid you know, together. Um,

Unknown Speaker 51:39
111 question if I may interrupt you, sorry. Yeah. Should throwing out that question here may do as well. Should we actually introduce a third alternative integrated code generation, consumer and storage?

Unknown Speaker 51:58
Yeah, so, um,

Unknown Speaker 52:02
I don’t know that it should be a third one we see. So in the difference between Australia and California, which is interesting, I think as long as the global as the world continues to evolve here, we all need to look at what different parts of the world are doing globally, and see what’s happening, what’s working right and what’s not working. But so in Australia, where you have to be a load, or a generation asset, or there are is a third one there, that’s like an intermittent renewable asset where you have a forecast, but you don’t have to follow your dispatch so closely, you can just generate as you need to. In California similar with California is working on some new classifications which are coming which are available this year. There’s a few plants going in this year that are hybrid where there’s an energy storage and renewable at one point of interconnection that is getting bid as one asset so it can charge it can discharge and it can do do renewable activity. But in Australia, that plant would have to be three different interconnections. But in California, it’s allowed to be one power plant. So there’s different ways of tackling it. And it really comes down to the system operator in terms of what technologies they have and what technical debt they have in their way of working if they if they if they have challenges in terms of how they dispatch and clear bids and get plants to operate that can’t be overcome unless they do it a very certain way that then it comes down to investing and upgrading what’s happening inside of that dispatch, and bid optimization software at the DSO level.

Unknown Speaker 53:51
Yep, yep. I think

Unknown Speaker 53:55
I actually wanted to ask that question to you before so I got the option.

Unknown Speaker 54:01
public setting it’s good. Yes,

Belén Gallego 54:03
it is. And you’re sharing knowledge, which is awesome. There is a question here about is it reasonable to harmonize the grid codes in the EU? I think there is a harmonization effort

Unknown Speaker 54:12
the ongoing

Belén Gallego 54:14
you eat 2006 631 there is a law and there’s like three years to finish to finalize it. So I think we’re going in that direction. Am I correct? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 54:26
we are going in that direction. I’m not familiar with all the the directives and paragraphs so so I can’t I can’t answer on that. But I know that there’s a lot of initiatives going on. And I know that the transmission system operators and and, and so he the umbrella organization for that in Europe, they do have a lot of work groups working on that and we see more and more of, for example, reserve transmission system or our system reserve sharing. So cooperation on that and grid cooperation stuff coming up. So a lot of Countries are starting to share resources with each other and these kind of things. So yes, we are going more and more towards an integrated, integrated.

Belén Gallego 55:08
And I think from last year actually this happens. We have a webinar a couple of days, but it’s about Spain about how the grid code in Spain is adapting to the one directive from the EU. So I know there is certainly something going on, but I don’t know the details of that well, so again, you know, good one. Yeah, sorry. Gone look other a

Unknown Speaker 55:29
malenko asked second from the end of the questions should battery be used three times a day for morning afternoon for demand management shaving peaks. Currently, my understanding is batteries are discharging only once a day. Ah. There are batteries today that do three to five cycles per day. Most of the ones that are doing that type of energy throughput are doing ancillary services frequency response where they are just very dynamically, little bursts of micro cycles, always switching Charging, discharging, charging, discharging all day long. They’re not really doing anything that’s, that’s, you know, intentionally doing a discharge here and a charge there. Most systems that are set up for some type of arbitrage are set up at the highest price time of day and the lowest price time of day. And so those ones would only do one battery cycle per day. So it’s not it’s not as I don’t have a straight answer. It’s not that a battery should do one or the other. The business case for each battery is dependent on the context, what markets are available, what your tariff looks like. All that kind of stuff. And you need to figure out that side of the equation first, because if you’re planning to buy a battery, that’s only going to do one cycle per day. That battery is cheaper than a battery that does three to five cycles per day. It’ll also last longer. And so it’s all baked into how you approach the business case and what type battery technology and sizing you do ahead of time, because if you’re gonna drive the battery a lot harder through its lifetime three to five cycles per day, you need to buy a system that’s capable of doing that. They’re not all equal. And if you if you buy a battery for one cycle a day and then start driving it two and three cycles per day, you will kill the battery sooner. And maybe that’s okay, if you suddenly have access to a new market that that actually pays for you to do that, that’s fine. But you have to have the right warranty terms in place, the right performance guarantees and the ability to have that type of flexibility with your asset in the long run.

Belén Gallego 57:36
Because you need to plan a lot and optimize

Unknown Speaker 57:38
Well, yes, maybe I can add on a couple of sentences. That is quite an interesting, interesting thing. I agree completely what you said, Look, what we see in Europe is that more and more projects and investors and developers are looking more and more into this. Let’s call it merchant projects, where you are not really doing ancillary services, but you would be doing arbitrage on the other hand intraday, balancing markets and all of that. And this, of course, opens up for a really, really interesting optimization challenge. How do you optimize a battery on something that you have no clue about how it will look like tomorrow. You don’t know what the market will be tomorrow? Will it be good prices, bad prices, you have an idea, but you don’t really know. So it’s a really interesting challenge to make a business case out of that, but the world is moving towards that direction. And, and we are we are on that track as well.

Unknown Speaker 58:33
Yeah. I want to add one more sentence to what Yan said, which is that he’s exactly right.

Unknown Speaker 58:41
It’s like any business. If you you have to have a little bit of risk appetite. You can’t, you’re not going to have a business case for a battery that’s so rock solid, it’s guaranteed to make you piles of money. You know what I mean? That’s just not how it works, that you take some risk, you plan very carefully and the key piece to make sure You’re not overly exposed as having a performance guarantee. So you base your business case on some type of conservative approach, you say, Okay, if I do arbitrage every day, and if I have some conservative view on on the price Delta, I can make the business case for this battery. But I’m not really making money I’m scraping by. But there’s probably going to be more volatility, there’s going to be new ancillary service markets, there’s going to be growing renewables. And in that context, I’m probably going to make more money than that, but you really nobody has a crystal ball. So you have to have a, you have to then go source and procure a battery that has the right type of warranty and life cycle guaranteed that if you do one cycle per day, it will last 1015 years. If you do two, three cycles a day, you still have some benchmark, it will last maybe seven years and that you have a framework where you know that if you do certain things, what those implications are so that through the life of your asset, you’re able to dynamically adapt to those changing market conditions.

Belén Gallego 1:00:05
Okay, we’re coming to the end of the time. So if there are any burning questions that you guys want to answer there at the back of this just final one or anything, there was one here that was very interesting, but I rather you pick ones that you, you, you might want to answer more, we have a few coming in now. The one that I had is like, literally, we had 30 gigs coming in, in Spain in the next 10 years of PV and another thing of wind, you know, Italy something similar. I mean, is this even doable? You know, like, you’re gonna end up with such big losses, you can’t even consumer those times. So unless you’re doing a really good job with optimizing, you know, the synergy. How do you manage that? Yeah, go for it.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:50
I think I think this goes back to the answer to another question before, I mean, we need to start to optimize everything to get every concept We can’t continue to sub optimize the electrical system and then we sub optimize the transport station and then we sub optimize the heat and cooling, we need to optimize everything and I talking about of course of sector coupling here, that is the way we need to go. And when we have a huge amount of excess capacity, we need to turn it into to synthetic fuels that can be used. For example, hydrogen that can be used directly at industries and then other types of synthetic fuels, maybe for transportation, maybe for power generation for other sectors. I mean, we need to take to start to optimize everything. If we look at Europe today, I mean, the the electricity, the energy that goes to electricity or is consumed as electricity is only one fourth of the energy consumption in Europe. Half of it goes to heating and cooling and the last for last 25%. This is for transportation, roughly speaking, so we need to do Do more sector coupling and more complete optimization of the system that is, that is my belief and then then for sure we will be able to take care of, of these 3020 gigawatts of additional solar on that Auckland. Cool.

Belén Gallego 1:02:16
Okay, some last words from you look, and we have someone that’s actually joined from Los Angeles, you must be quite early there.

Unknown Speaker 1:02:23
Um, yeah, I like the I want to answer one of the last questions. Um, it asks about batteries regarding battery lifetime, how the batteries be disposed of, without violating environmental regulations. So just briefly, what’s inside the batteries is basically metal. It’s different types of metal layered and stacked in there. There’s the electrolyte, but again, it’s it’s highly recyclable. Honestly, the reason we don’t see massive battery recycling yet is because of economies of scale. We’re seeing this more and more with PV that it’s gotten to a point where there’s an silicon panels that are reaching end of life that there’s piles of panels sitting on people who have who are entrepreneurial, are collecting those and they’re highly recyclable, you can melt them down and re extract the same elements out of them and you don’t have to mine for them. You just melt them, separate them use them. Again, the same thing goes for lithium ion batteries as we get more of them the recycling opportunity as mining continues to be a challenge and limited resources. Once we have all these already separated, it’s arguably easier to separate out from a battery than it is from the raw minerals from the rocks. So I think there’s a lot of potential opportunity for business there. And it’s just a matter of time before there’s enough to have economies of scale enough momentum to make sense to invest in building those types of infrastructures we already see it at with various battery vendors globally that they have

Unknown Speaker 1:04:01
They’re they’re very willing to include

Unknown Speaker 1:04:05
end of life. In the contract from the beginning, we see it often in different RFPs and proposals where it’s actually required that we did include a price for when it gets into life that we can take it away. And we partnered with the different battery vendors to do that.

Belén Gallego 1:04:22
Well, thank you very much, john, thank you very much. Look, you guys have any further questions you guys are available, they can reach out to you correct? your emails in the in the presentation if I’m not wrong, so or, you know, get in touch with us, we’ll put you in touch. And thank you very much for being here today. I don’t know if this is of interest, but in the topic of recycling, I know the World Bank energy storage partnership is bringing out some actual reports on you know, what can be done in terms of recycling and reusing. So I will recommend that those because they’re really like, full reports and you know, they’re available for everyone. And, as I said, you know, get in touch with them. Get in touch with john, delighted to hear from you. And I’ll see you in the next time. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you guys. Thank you. Bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai