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- [00:00]
A
I'm your host, Ed Porter. Welcome back to Transmission. At a Glance, batteries can look simple. A contract, a revenue line, a box in the field. But as storage matures, the easy story falls away. Sam Harden, Director of Storage at Infinity Global Works in global markets where value depends not only on getting built, but staying available and performing. This episode is about what happens after the initial rush for battery projects. How do you get the most from your storage assets? Before we get started, a lot of people listening will have follow up questions after an episode like this. Those are exactly the questions that Ko Moto Energy's AI analyst is built for. Try it out now. Link in the comments. So let's jump in. Hello Sam.
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B
Hi Ed. Good to see you again.
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A
Great to see you as well. And let's jump into the contrarian view or what do people always get wrong about batteries?
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B
So I think what is a hot topic at the moment is tolls and tolling. For Bess, what I see is that this is not a silver bullet for the industry and for projects to remove risk. What they are really is a reallocation of risk. They have become popular because it is a way in which to try and attract more financing and providing a long term revenue stream. But what people often miss is that in some circumstances you can be increasing your risk when it comes to the operational availability. So whereas you are just working on a merchant basis and you can be losing revenue under these contracts, you could be, you could be liable for more strenuous penalties than just lost revenue. So what's really important is it's understanding not just my market risk, but my availability risk.
- [01:58]
A
It's kind of like the devil is in the detail. Right. So on the face of it at all seems so straightforward. It's like, okay, for 10 years or 15 years I'm going to get X amount of money and then you can take that to a financier and say I've got this contract and they go, great, you're going to make this amount of money. It's so easy for me to put dead in against that, that toll so that you can get access to cheap capital. But you're saying actually if I sign that toll and then something goes wrong with the assets availability, then you could get into a sort of a tricky situation on that toll and you could be losing money in a way that you weren't expecting.
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B
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think it's the same case as well. We've seen for long term auctions like the Maxe recently in Italy, it's the same issue Again, you are eliminating one risk, but you are perhaps increasing another risk. And if you do not have control and the right sort of plan around to manage that, you are not necessarily removing risk. Toll has their use. But I think what we are evolving to is not just looking at a toll, but how can I provide some level of security without overexposing myself operationally. And I think that's something we're seeing even on the other side from traders and from off takers. Actually having an asset owner that has some skin in the game and is incentivized to optimize and be there to maximize revenues can be beneficial to them. Again, with a toll you are there to provide the availability as the bare minimum from the contract.
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A
Yeah. And I think just to stay on tolls for a second. So you mentioned availability is kind of one of the ways that you could, let's say, get caught out. And so let's say your availability isn't the 95 or the 98% that so it drops down to 94%. All of a sudden you have to pay an amount of money to kind of make the other party whole. There are also other things. Right. In tolls you mentioned a. It takes a long time, so nine months, 12 months. That's a lot of time to be putting into projects to get people distracted from other things. I think you've also got this kind of changes in law. So what happens when the ground underneath you changes that the rules of the market change? You then have to reopen these things, renegotiate them. So there could be a lot of complexity in these processes that maybe could kind of catch you out. If you're not 100% aware of what you're getting into, as you say, with a non toll structure like a profit share, then it's much more that sort of both parties are keen to get as much money as possible from the asset and so you're both aligned in the right way. Whereas in a toll, because it's allocating between both parties, there's much more sort of confrontation in the contract design.
- [04:31]
B
Absolutely. And when there is a change, it's who is feeling the effects of that? Is it the taller. Is it the asset operator? It depends. Is it a market? Could there be a change in the way that grid fees are charged? Which who does that sit with? And again, if you do not have that alignment where it's in both interests to maximize as far as possible, that's when you're going to run into issues. And with these contracts, particularly in the battery Space. It's very difficult to plan ahead for every scenario. We've seen how much it's evolved and changed in recent years. We know that the market is going to continue to evolve and get more complicated and sophisticated. So yeah, that is absolutely another challenge that we can see with that sort of structure.
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A
Okay. And you dropped in the MAXA very quickly. Let's just remind people what the MAXA is.
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B
So the MAXA auction was a long term fixed revenue contract run by the TSO Turner in Italy and what it would do with providing 15 years. You would get a fixed revenue for that time. And as the asset owner, your responsibility was really to ensure availability. And the dispatch instruction would be sent by Turner. And we had the first auction take place last year. I think it was about for a gigawatt of volume.
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A
Okay. And that's different to say gb, right, because gb, you decide to build your asset and then you can sort of self dispatch. So you, the owner of the asset can choose to dispatch your asset however you see fit. But with the maxa, you've got that sort of involvement directly from the tso. So the transmission system operator, which is, as you say, Turner.
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B
Exactly. That's exactly it.
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A
Very good. Okay. So always good to get these things covered. Let's move on because I think there's another misconception that I'm keen to talk about in the battery space and that is that it's both true and false, this thing that there's a gold rush in batteries, that essentially it's about how fast can you get into a market and can you get into a market in the early stages when they're just starting to open up markets in say frequency response? And the sort of story, historic story, is if you can get in quickly and you can do the thing that gas was doing in quite an expensive way, that's frequency control. So making sure the frequency stays at 50Hz or 60Hz wherever the grid is, that if you can do that, you get paid some bumper payout. And that's the whole battery principle. It's all about can you move quickly and get stuff in. Do you think people really think that? What's your take?
- [06:55]
B
I think so. And I think there is an element in truth of there being a gold rush era battery storage. The first commercial projects were only deployed a decade ago and this was a shiny new asset of which sudden considerable value was being attached to. And it was a race to really bring that volume online. And so in a sense it was true. If you could be first to market Once this value opportunity was realized, there was chance for these high returns. But obviously, as we saw in the uk, the first rush was for providing ancillary services. Once storage technology became commercially viable and the market sort of opened to allow the storage participation. It was a value gap and we knew that storage was competitive there against the existing thermal assets that were providing that. But what we've seen over time is it's less of a scarcity trade. And now we are moving into a maturing market where an asset is having to look across multiple revenue streams, it's having to look at how it can contract and finance those revenues, and again moving into the operational excellence and keeping availability. So is it over? Was it a gold rush? I think partially, yes, but I think there is enough volume now there to be built. And so the initial phase, the initial rush might be done where you can sort of make these premiums and value by developing and bringing assets to market.
- [08:37]
A
And that could be like a payback in like three or four years.
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B
Exactly those days, exactly those days are done or sort of coming to an end. There's limited sort of new origination to be done, you know, at least in a lot of the, the major markets like UK and Italy and Germany still to execute and bring those projects to ready to build. But really it is now an evolution and it is. Okay, well, who is now able to build these assets, contract these assets, finance and then operate in the most competitive and effective way? And when we talk about, there's always a question in storage and I think even from the beginning, what happens when all the batteries come online and begin to cannibalize each other or saturate?
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A
Right. It's maybe a top question that we
- [09:25]
B
get asked the top question. And you would have had it from all people in industry, from outside of industry, from executives in your career. That has always been the question. It's been amplified by what happened in the UK with the saturation of the ancillary services. But what we're actually seeing is that storage is now recognized and embedded in our electricity infrastructure. It is becoming maturing rather than saturating. The value of storage is being realized, but now it's really becoming an asset. How do we operate? It's not a question of can storage do this job? It's going to be there. It's no longer about just sort of showing up. You have to show up. You have to show up perfectly every day. And you also need to try and do it better than everyone else in the industry. And it probably begins to look a Bit more like what a traditional utility would be waking up and building a business around to sort of maintain their sort of thermal assets, but just on a bigger distributed basis, let's say.
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A
So I think it's a really good description of kind of how the industry is maturing very quickly. Is it good news, is it bad news for you? I mean you're developing a whole heap of assets all over the globe. Is this something that you would welcome this maturing or is it something that's like. Actually, you know what, it'd be lovely if we were like back to day one and we could get some really quick paybacks in through the door.
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B
Yeah, I would say those times were exciting, but we're now sort of moving into. We talk about skip rates or settlement periods or more sort of details in
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A
how we're now into the niche.
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B
It's exactly how are we getting the most value out of this asset, not just the very beginning. What even is a megawatt hour megawatt. That's what we're doing at the start of careers. For me personally and for Infinity Global, who I'm director for their storage business, we are evolving as the industry is. Infinity Global, when I joined just over three years ago, we're a set of energy and primarily where that had come from was from the development, construction and building of solar management. Realize the way the world was moving and that if we're going to be a seller of energy, we need to have flexibility and management of flexibility as well. And so in the last few years as a company that is not a big utility, have a big, big balance sheet. We try to get value from development but now that focus is switching to the construction and build out. There's a lot to be taken if you have the experience in building out other energy assets. And that's now what we're trying to apply to storage.
- [12:09]
A
So for bigger players who are bringing through lots of sites, it starts to become not about like opportunistically are we the right place, right time. It's more about the principles that have governed being good managers of energy assets for X number of years. How do we best apply those and make sure that we run those on batteries correctly so that we're in the right place. And I think going back to the sort of maturing good versus bad, I feel like there is some. It would be lovely to have very high revenues and be able to provide consumers value. Like that's the sweet spot of every market. But in the sort of maturing of the market and more competition coming in, then it's okay. As long as the businesses that deploy in these assets are maturing with them and are working to find ways of getting good value out of the assets, but also value for consumers.
- [12:58]
B
Absolutely. And I think that the fun part of this is that although we're talking about maturing, this is still a whole new asset class. And that's why there's still a lot of evolution to go. And that's why we say is the gold rush over. There's not been a lot of megawatts or gigawatts built of storage. When you look at the ramp ups that we're actually expecting in 2030, it's incredible what still has to be built. And I think we're really only scratching the surface still in how do we get best value not even just at the asset level, at the portfolio level, or even sort of integrated with other assets, which is what I think people are now starting to think about. But this is the first time that we've had these sort of assets which can import, they can export, they can ramp up or down in milliseconds, they can provide active power, they can support grid stability. It's a basket of tricks which hasn't really been seen on the grid. And that is sort of the next phase that we're seeing in storage is how do you optimize that? How do you get the best value from that?
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A
I think it's really interesting. So a few things we've got just on the build out, right? So we've probably got 10 to 20 gigawatts ish batteries in Europe so far. I think by 2030 that could look something like 50 to maybe 100 perhaps if things go extremely well. But that's still like 25 to 50 billion that's going to come into the space. So yeah, we're still so early stage in this and there's a lot to get excited about in terms of infrastructure investors who want to get into these types of projects. I think on your point about how do we get the sort of most out of the sort of. Did you say basket of tricks? I quite like that. Yeah, yeah, I quite like that. It's like people say Swiss army knife, there's a few different expressions for it, but how do you get the most out of it? We've just had an inertia auction in GB and we had sort of early phase versions of that inertia auction and batteries provided inertia in those services. And this latest version, I think there was an amendment of the rules Halfway through, where essentially it meant that the batteries technically failed that process. And I think it's a really good example of sort of what you're saying, which is batteries can do so much more than just keeping good frequency where it should be, or buying low and selling high. They can do all these other kind of things like voltage control, inertia on the system. And we have all these additional things that batteries can do, but we haven't really got into the detail of kind of how do we get, how do we fine tune these assets, how do we get the most out of them for systems? And I think that's probably one of the things I'm most excited about in the battery space.
- [15:31]
B
And it's proving those right and then sort of getting those verified under the existing codes and regulations. And you referenced there the inertia auction in GPGB in Spain. We see a similar story where batteries are receiving transmission connection offers, where yes, you can connect, but it's conditional to you building and operating a synchronous condenser to manage inertia and grid stability issues. So again, right now that is a condition to connect, but there is a sort of an education and a process to be done there. We're saying actually we don't need this great massive synchronous condenser. We've got this best system that could do a lot of what you are actually worried about and what you're requiring. So, yeah, absolutely. That's a fascinating piece to watch.
- [16:23]
A
Yeah. And I think if I sort of get the crystal ball out and look five years forward, I think we're spending a lot of time talking about voltage control, fault currents, inertia, which may sound a little bit like dry to some people, but if you're into transmission and you've heard a lot of these episodes, you'll know that we talk about this a lot. And I'm also very excited about it. I look forward to it. Yeah. Okay, so let's go on to then actually developing these projects. So we are maturing. But then commercially and technically on these sites, what decisions are you making around those sites to make sure that they are best set up for the future world?
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B
Yeah, there's a few ways we're looking at that, setting up for the future world. What we have seen over the last few years as an easy way to demonstrate is this increase in value of the energy and the duration of the systems as we move further away from just providing fast response services to moving more into the space, which would be
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A
like the half hour system from A few years ago.
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B
Exactly.
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2016, 2017 is now becoming a three. Most commonly people ask, oh, should it be three or four hours these days?
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B
Exactly. And I think by fluke, a few have provided that optionality because of where the industry has come. So I can even give an example. So a few years ago, projects where projects that were getting submitted into planning three or four years ago, possibly still waiting for their connection or final connection dates in the UK would have been submitted with shipping containers or 20 foot shipping containers that maybe had 2 and a half megawatt hours as an NG density. Now the standard is beyond 5, we're at 5 and most are now offering far far greater than that. So even in those plans that were submitted a few years ago, there is the possibility to potentially double capacity in those same footprints. But I think now people are looking and certainly we are proactively, how do we future proof, how do we allow the space physically and electronically within the equipment to augment and change the capacity or add, if that's where the business case is directed in the future, or even have equipment which is capable of providing a lot of the services you mentioned there on grid stability in a lot of markets that's not yet a remunerated scheme. A lot of them are under consultation or there's some trials. But we know it's something that's coming in the future and that's a decision we have to take. Do you look at putting in possibly slightly more expensive grid forming inverters that can do that even though you don't get paid for it immediately? It's a challenge as an investor, but it's something that we look at very carefully.
- [19:12]
A
I was at dinner with some inverter providers recently and they were very keen to tell me that it wasn't expressly the inverter that's more expensive, it's more like the configuration and the testing of it for systems that kind of takes longer and so all of that additional work costs more. But the thing itself is kind of largely unchanged and I have to take
- [19:33]
B
their word for it the same.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're definitely seeing that. I think the other thing that's quite interesting. Right, so you said that one of the ways this is happening is you go for planning and you have say 10 sort of concrete plinths that you're going to put batteries on. The other thing that's happening is that for batteries that have been operating for a while, one of the options that is coming up is because the energy density in the battery is getting Better. You originally had a 3 megawatt hour, 20 foot container, now you can have an 8 megawatt hour, 20 foot Container. And so Gresham House, who are one of the storage funds in gb, they essentially did this augmentation because obviously they're a fund and it's public where they were sort of swapping out these old containers and bringing in sort of three or four hour systems. And so yes, you can kind of augment in the planning stage, but also when you go live, it's not like you're going to be a 1 megawatt, 4 megawatt hour system forever. If the system needs something, as you say, the basket of tricks point, you could easily be a six hour system. If in seven years time, that's what we need and let's say seven years, who knows when you're actually going to be replacing that system. It could be sooner, it could be later. But there are so many options with these systems that I think people probably haven't really understood how we can get the most out of these batteries in the long run.
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B
Absolutely. And that comes back to our first contrarian viewpoint.
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A
That
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B
as well as technically, considering it's also commercial. How do I allow that flexibility? Do I want to allow that flexibility knowing that I might be able to improve that value in the future? As we know, the market is just changing so quickly.
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A
Yeah, that's a good point. So you have a toll. The toll says 70k per megawatt per year. Actually a new system comes along, or a new product comes along, voltage control, whatever it is, there's an extra 5 or 10k per megawatt per year on the table. How does the contract make sure that's enabled and people can go after that? And I'm sure there'll be some very good lawyers who'll be like, I tell you what, Ed, I've got a really good answer to that and I'm sure they will send me a message and say it's a good answer to it. Okay, let's move off this and let's go on to the next phase of things maturing. So in general, when things go from early stage tech to later stage tech and they're more mature and investors get more comfortable, the thing we see in lots of markets is consolidation. The very early days you have 100 players because you've got 100 enthusiasts that come into the space. If I look at say the number of gas units that are owned by players in gb, it's not that many. It used to be the big eight When I first started in industry, which was maybe quite a long time ago, but it used to be the big eight. And so do you think we'll see that same consolidation in the battery space and we'll see sort of 10 or 20 players globally, or do you think it'll still be the same sort of disparate, like 100 or 200 asset owners or funds?
- [22:09]
B
I think there will be in part a consolidation. I think when markets begin to mature, those that can become competitive, it does become about scale, it does become about those that do have the means to have the balance sheet or able to raise the capital. I think where there is still room for disruption is that, as I say, there's still a lot to be built, there's still room and players are beginning to establish themselves and perhaps not burdened by storage, is a disruptor and displacer of thermal. If I've already got an existing thermal fleet, how do I manage that? Do I cannibalize myself? That is sort of a question. That's why that question has got asked when I've worked at utilities before, although the response is always, if it's not us, someone else will do it for sure.
- [23:10]
A
For sure. We've already seen, I mean, we see a lot of big utilities going into batteries. Most recently we've seen Drax doing a lot of business in terms of picking up other sort of flexible assets in the market. So there's definitely that sort of splitting out. But going back to the first point you made, you think there'd be like a cost of capital shootout, that the people with the access to the lowest capital will be able to pick up
- [23:32]
B
these projects again, in part. And I think a lot of what can drive this in different markets as well will be regulation and how much markets remain open. Going back to maxe and the results of maxe. And the winner, the majority winner of that was the incumbent Italian utility. Exactly. So again, the more open the market is, I think the more room for that innovation disruption and more players to come in. If we go down a full regulated route, it becomes more. More challenging. And that's what we've seen in other markets. I think just. And one thing to add this is talking about the asset owners where clearly there is still room for new entrants. And where we're seeing that is it's. It's really in the sophistication. So the optimization of this, that has all tended to come from new players. And now we're not just sort of talking about what that's still Got a road to run. But it's also not just commercial, but technical as well. AI gets banded around a lot in how, how can I squeeze out an extra 10% on my lifetime? And that those extra percentages are going to make a lot of difference as we move to a sort of more maturing, marginal type market.
- [24:54]
A
Yeah, I totally agree. Like we are not done with how do we get the most from the battery fleet. Something we say a lot, but it's really clear, like when you're on the inside of seeing these projects, it's absolutely true that we really are still in the starting blocks for how to get the best of these assets. So let's go on to what happens next. So we know that we're kind of the gold rush. We're through the gold rush. We're starting to look at multiple markets. There is a maturing, how does a company get the most out of the next few years?
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B
It's really important these years to establish a position. So I think there is still a chance to secure, let's say above infrastructure rate returns.
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A
What does that mean?
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B
So what does it mean? So I guess in a pure mature market, infrastructure, stable revenues, which you could sort of align with mature markets, but relatively low rates of return. So a low risk, 6 to 10,
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A
that type of ballpark.
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B
Exactly, exactly. I think. And perhaps speaking from this perspective of a sort of a growth utility, you
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A
could call it,
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B
we look to try and secure more than that by coming into this market early. And that can allow us to compete and try to establish and then in the long term compete against those, say bigger incumbents that maybe have to buy and pay that premium to enter into the market.
- [26:24]
A
So you're then thinking about the right time and place to execute in terms of entering the market. But do you also think about sort of operational excellence? You mentioned just before we started recording about this kind of incident you had in north Japan where you had five meters of snow all falling very quickly. How do you actually deal with stuff like that? Because nobody making a financial spreadsheet is thinking about 5 meters of snow all getting dumped all at the same time.
- [26:49]
B
It's everything. Even for getting the asset online, I think there is a danger of sitting behind spreadsheets, sitting behind contracts. There is only so far you can go to protect. You cannot completely sit behind contracts and fully de risk your operation. At some point as an asset owner, you need to look at those mitigation and plans and it becomes so key. Like with speaking in Japan, how do you plan for one in a century Events of snow. But should that happen, you be unprepared. It can have incredible damage to a company. It's not just a case of being offline, but that sort of snow would crush panels. And we think the same way with a battery and it's more complicated. That's it. I think from a development perspective, it's easy to slip into. This is quite straightforward. You know, it's a bunch of boxes in a field, not a particularly big space, even when we're talking about large megawatts. But first of all, we're talking about some of these very high voltage connections, very sophisticated kit, very complex.
- [28:02]
A
What does that actually mean? Right. Does that mean that for like your battery supplier or your inverter supplier, you're making sure that you pick someone who has the. Or like a factory or like a service hub within the country, so that when stuff goes wrong, they have someone who's trained, who can come to site and let's hope it's just flicking a switch. But let's say it's more than that. They have spares, they have things they can kind of put into these projects. Is that really what you mean?
- [28:24]
B
Yeah. And to try and put this in basic terms, you know, I might have a warranty for my vacuum cleaner and if it breaks, I can, through maybe a slightly arduous process, try to get a filter replaced and they send it from wherever and it takes a couple of weeks and it's a bit annoying, but at least I don't need to pay for a new one. Whereas if this happens with my battery and I have a critical part which fails and I've got a product warranty, so someone has to come in and fix that. But there will be a time delay. If I haven't managed that, if I'm then having to call up and say, hey, I've got my warranty, this is broken, can you come and do it? Yeah, sure. It'll be there in a few weeks. If you haven't planned for what happens when that's there, either through being very clear in the delivery or through having those parts available, you are exposed. No one is going to. Your product warranty isn't going to say, oh, you've lost X millions in that time because you weren't able to deliver your revenue, they're not going to cover that, that's not their responsibility. So that's where it becomes important. And to try and sort of foresee and manage that and still in the most cost effective way.
- [29:28]
A
And it could be really like wrong time, wrong place. So let's say it's really hot and something breaks or indeed there's five minutes of snow, it's really cold and the system's under lots of stress if stuff goes wrong at times the system stress, if you are being covered to some degree by damages by your equipment provider, like they're not going to cover the very, very peak returns that you'd be missing. And so yeah, this could get quite tricky quite quickly.
- [29:52]
B
Yeah, it's a few days of the year can make or break the value from that year, particularly in certain markets. We're also looking to build projects this year in ercot, you know, where Texas again, it can come down to 10 days where you can make or break your year. So yeah, it's so critical.
- [30:11]
A
Yeah, ERCOT's a fascinating market. I want to talk about one more thing before we wrap up, which is that we've talked that we've kind of entered the market with batteries and now we've got this. Every single market kind of looks the same. It all kind of looks like this kind of enter, enter and then everything ramps up. Like all of these build out curves always look that way. So people have big plans about the capacity they're going to add. And in reality that means that people want to build a lot of batteries all at the same time. And you're sort of thinking, okay, well I want to build these batteries as well. But you're not physically going to be building the batteries. You're going to be working with companies to get this done. Are you worried that the supply chain of both equipment, but also like professionally qualified people is going to be there when you want to hit go and get these projects into place?
- [30:55]
B
In short, yes. I think one of the biggest bottlenecks to realizing now is not the technology, it's not the business case. The scale of what has to be delivered is now exponential. Do we have the human resource to be able to do that? The most tangible way is thinking, yes. Who are the guys actually going in and fitting and putting. But it's even those that have the skill to be able to package a system, a supply contract, an offtake contract, a banking contract.
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A
Yeah.
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B
You know, to such a volume across many markets. I don't know. You know, when you look at, when you look at the market today has, have the people that have been involved, has it grown to the scale and is it going to be able to accelerate again? I think one way we are tackling, at least one way, I can give an example within infinity is there is no silo between technologies. So when I joined to really help transform and enable us to deliver storage, it was within the existing regional teams for solar. And rather than just only hiring those that were experienced in Bess, it was bringing in those that had those skills. But then to use that to upskill those that already were there. And that's the only way we're going to do that. I know it's. That's just within. Okay. It's renewables. So already, you know, power. There's a lot of. A lot of synergies there. But we're going to have to pull people from those other industries.
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A
Right.
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B
If the other industries in oil and gas or other manufacturing or anywhere in the client, you know, those, those are the people we need to bring in, you know, as well as the focus on ensuring that we can bring more young people through. Right. And they're not dissuaded and they're sort of not forgotten as we take more simple tasks from AI or the direction it's going.
- [32:56]
A
I mean, we have, let's say, 50 gigs to deploy in Europe. There is no way that you could imagine that we have deployed 50 gigs up until this point. That's pretty obvious. And so we have to get people into this space. It's a hugely pressing issue. And maybe with that segue, I get into my sort of final question, which is that, let's say I put you in charge of European battery rollout tomorrow. Congratulations. What would you do? What's your. What's the one thing you'd change to make things work better?
- [33:24]
B
I would change whatever, whatever rules to allow you to add a battery to every existing generation system if you wanted to. In the uk. It baffles me how difficult it is to do that when a battery is added, at least that sort of, say, to intermittent renewable generation and particularly. So where I spend a lot of my time, it is. It is effectively doing the opposite. That is not a constrained operation. It is helping whatever issue is being caused by either asset.
- [33:55]
A
It's just how markets work. When there's lots of solar, you want to charge.
- [33:59]
B
Yes.
- [33:59]
A
Like, why would you discharge. When there's lots of solar? That's pointless.
- [34:02]
B
Exactly. Exactly. And I, I think we're getting, like. There are the discussions I can say in Italy, again, where a lot of my focus is right now, permitting rules have been changed and introduced in the last year, which is allowing an accelerated addition of storage to permitted solar sites. So the will is there. If I could change that in a day, it would unlock so much growth so quickly.
- [34:33]
A
My guess is people would be very panicked about it. But then when they see the things that storage is actually doing, they would be kind of like, oh, actually, I don't know why we were so worried about this in the first place.
- [34:41]
B
Absolutely.
- [34:43]
A
Maybe a grid operator is going to come on next week and tell me to see that. I hope so. Yeah, I hope so, Sam. Well, thank you very much for coming on and sharing your expertise with us. You've been a fantastic guest and hope to have you on again soon.
- [34:56]
B
Thanks so much. Pleasure.