Rethink Energy Podcast

In this episode Toronto-based energy consultant and analyst Ed Ho joins us to discuss the present situation of the nuclear power industry - and the prospects for future deployments.We ask - what is the "true" cost of nuclear power - is it more like the recent Western new-build overruns on cost and construction time which resulted in levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) north of $150 per MWh due to repeated overruns, or is the surface-level $40 per MWh for nuclear power on South Korea's power market more realistic?The discussion also covers prospects for several major future markets such as Poland and the US - and the potential for South Korea's KEPCO to develop projects in other countries as it has so successfully with the Barakah power plant in the UAE.

Both the EV power battery industry and the energy storage industry have grown over 60% year-on-year in Q1, according to various statistics - but even a fourfold growth in demand could be acommodated by the existing production capacity of lithium, as the energy storage segment can respond to future raw material price hikes by adopting alternative chemistries like vanadium-flow and sodium-ion.

China will implement a major new power market reform next month, introducing Contracts for Difference (CfDs) and an ancillary services market which will greatly increase the revenue of battery energy projects. Renewable additions will slow down compared to the immense boom of the past two years, but the battery energy storage industry needed this - it needs to switch to organic market-driven growth, rather than an unsustainable co-location requirement based paradigm which resulted in poor-quality installations and a 50% utilization rate.The biggest consequence for the rest of the world will simply be that China's power prices are not significantly shifting as it shifts from coal plus hydro, over to new energy. China's competitive advantage is going nowhere.

South Korea is to develop a 3.2 GW, $13 billion offshore wind complex - which will also require transmission expansions to deliver power to load centers.Poland's nuclear development deal with Bechtel and Westinghouse has been renewed - with as much as $51 billion and six reactors at stake, with wind and solar possibly insufficient as the main national energy strategy.The US' battery supply from China is obstructed by tariffs - while US and Indian manufacturing efforts have yet to reach anything like the necessary scale to replace China.

In this episode we spoke to Tina Anderson, Head of Sales at Hystar, a Norwegian electrolyzer manufacturer with 100 MW production capacity - growing towards 4.5 GW. We cover topics including ramping up and down to react to electricity prices - as well as providing demand response services to the grid, the production cost of hydrogen electrolysis, and the policy environment in Europe.

Spain's massive blackout vindicates the investments being made into synchronous condensers and grid-forming inverters in Australia and northern China. While an official post-mortem has not been released yet for Spain's blackout, South Australia's 2016 blackout may provide a close parallel - including the policies adopted afterwards to stop it from happening again.Thermal energy storage is being adopted at scale in China in order to provide heat to industry - with molten salt tanks installed in pilots at coal power plants.The solar industry's silver paste consumption is roughly equal in scale to the global silver shortage - we discuss the prospects of adopting alternatives to intensive silver paste use.

In this episode, we spoke to Randall Bowen, Managing Director of Voltalis UK – the biggest European demand-side flexibility operator. Of particular interest to the UK's energy strategy is its GW-scale fleet of storage heaters, which are not currently responsive to spot market electricity prices. When the relevant authorities give their stamp of approval for Voltalis to install its devices, they will become part of grid flexibility – a crucial step given the UK's struggles with other types of grid development.Voltalis is a French company with 1,500,000 integrated appliances across more than 200,000 residential and commercial buildings in Europe, now expanding into the UK.

Australia's pumped hydro fleet now promises over 500 GWh of storage capacity - meaning the county is set to be a world leader (or leader of the West) on pumped hydro, mostly with 10-hour duration, just as it was a world leader on BESS adoption.President Trump has mauled the offshore wind industry by calling Empire Wind 1's approvals into question - in an even harsher move than we'd expected.Solar manufacturing is down 45% year-on-year, as output declines back towards the 600 GW "plateau" value of demand - which the world will struggle to accelerate beyond.

Trump's tariffs mark a redoubled shift of the US away from free trade, but it's hard to find a direct impact on renewables - since the US was already a hostile policy environment, and the rest of the world already had Chinese overcapacity.The UK and South Korea are both considering zonal pricing reforms to their power markets, which would rationally push industries to move closer to renewable energy power projects, but may disadvantage renewables and South Korea's KEPCO.Trina Solar and Oxford PV's technology licensing deal is big news for perovskites - but it's still hard to say how far away commercialization is.

Silver paste usage in solar cell manufacturing remains at around 10 mg/W, or 10 tons per GW, and the global silver demand remains elevated at 20% higher than supply even since 2021 - with the solar industry accounting for 20% of all demand for silver worldwide. This is causing a constant increase in the price of the metal, which has doubled from pre-pandemic levels and is still rising. There are negative feedback mechanisms such as adoption of copper electroplating, and recycling of lower-purity waste, but there's a lot more room for price rises before these are worth implementing in a way which would seriously alter supply or demand. The same supply-demand gap and constant gradual price rises can be expected to persist for some time. 

In this episode we spoke to Chris Hyde, senior Sales Manager and Meteorologist at Meteomatics - a company which forecasts the weather for the energy sector. Forecasting data is useful for everything from deciding where to build wind and solar power plants, to deciding when to discharge batteries in light in expected wind-solar power output and demand on the grid, to deciding when the schedule maintenance operations. Meteomatics is a Swiss company established across Europe and expanding its operations in the US - especially Texas.

Trina Solar has announced a 3.1 square meter, 808-Watt silicon-perovskite tandem solar module, which with 26% efficiency is better than any module on the market today - but extra manufacturing cost and a shorter lifespan means the upcoming semiconductor is not across the finish line yet.Texas has adopted a power market reform under which 50% of new power plant development in the state to be "dispatchable" - which in this case is defined to mean gas, not batteries. Utilities and power plant owners not complying with the 50% requirement will have to pay a reliability fee as compliance.

RWE and TotalEnergies have signed a 30,000-ton annual green hydrogen supply deal to run from 2030 to 2044 - how can green hydrogen production become cost-effective in the context of the German energy crisis?Kelin Electric has announced an intention to raise $200 million for a 1 GW perovskite cell and module factory - but its product offering appears to be the peculiar single-junction, full-weight type being pursued by several Chinese companies, which has a less obvious business case compared to tandems.

Spain's utility Iberdrola is upgrading its pre-existing hydropower reservoirs to pumped hydro - a huge potential storage reservoir for Western Europe. The UK has announced it will expedite offshore wind permitting times, potentially halving lead times in the world's second-largest market for such projectsSome perovskite solar manufacturers have raised the funding they need to fund mass production and commercialisation - but many others haven't yet, in the context of economic uncertainty and a looming recession.

Data centers are pursuing a mixture of renewable energy, gas, and nuclear power to ensure they have a supply of sustainable, reliable and affordable power, in a microcosm of the energy trilemmaA 2,600-kilometer submarine HVDC line has been proposed to link New Zealand and Australia - with huge arbitrage potential across demand peaks over a 2-hour timezone distance.Europe's leadership has proposed a $100 billion clean manufacturing fund - is this enough to finally shore up domestic manufacturing in the face of China and the US' Inflation Reduction Act?

German elections have seen the Green Party sidelined and a centre-right government taking power - but this seemingly won't be enough to prompt a restoration of mothballed nuclear plants, even as German industry shrank for the seventh quarter in a row due to energy costs. The IEA has published a report on the lengthening lead times and supply bottlenecks for transmission infrastructure - this problem will shape Western energy deployments for decades to come, skewing investments in favour of distributed resources and microgrids. Flexible solar panel products are appearing using silicon cells, demonstrating that the limiting technology is more the encapsulation solution rather than the need for flexible semiconductors such as perovskite. HD KSOE is exploring the development of a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) built into a container ship - and floating nuclear could be useful off US coasts as well.

In this episode of Rethink Energy Talks, we're joined by Joe Dutton, Axis Capital's Innovation Lead, to discuss the role of insurance in the renewable energy sector, beginning with offshore wind and Chinese imports, then expanding to a sweeping discussion of the energy transition as a whole.

China will switch its renewable energy power projects over to market-based pricing from June 1st 2025, while also abolishing battery co-location requirements, following on from ever steeper time-of-day pricing, and a 2024 reform which introduced capacity payments for coal and gas plants. China's reform parallel the more gradual reforms cutting Feed-in tariffs and Net Metering across multiple Western markets. The Trump Administration intends to boost domestic oil and gas production and exports - this is bad news for renewable energy investments worldwide, as would a loosening of sanctions on Russia, but transmission is the main limiting factor in many mature markets anyway. Compressed-air energy storage (CAES) is being built out in artificial excavations in China at prices which aren't wholly worse than lithium-ion BESS, considering the relative youth of the technology. Perovskites and solid-state batteries face the same problem - the mainstream technologies of silicon PV and LFP batteries are already cheap and high quality, and are also still improving their quality, preventing a 'moving target' to the more innovative future replacement.

As the Baltic states switch synchronization from the Russian to the Western European grid, construction will soon begin at an Estonian pumped hydro project with deep underground excavation works. meanwhile Norway has backed off from an offshore wind expansion which would have increased its international transmission connection across the North Sea.Australia's CSP company, Vast, is working towards FiD at its Port Augusta project - concentrated solar power is niche, but by no means dying off.China's north is the most likely site for the world's green hydrogen, but actual project construction remains low in absolute terms, with more price improvement needed to become truly profitable.

In this episode of Rethink Energy Talks, we're joined by Jorg Heinemann, CEO of Enervenue - whose nickel-hydrogen energy storage batteries promise 30,000-cycle lifespan, enduring draining to zero, partial discharge, and potentially scaling to up to 12 hours of storage duration. So this is a long-duration energy storage battery product, with manufacturing now being scaled up, but with other points of appeal too, such as being made in the US.

With DeepSeek and other LLMs achieving reduced energy intensity, data centers in the US can still add easily 40 TWh of power demand per year - under President Trump, some of this will be met by gas plants.Batteries have replaced gas plants in the new-build category in the Polish and UK capacity markets - but when will the capacity market be designed around long-duration storage instead?Western wind OEMs have posted restored profits and have returned to the pursuit of large-size turbine designs, after a multi-year period of cost pressure.

DeepSeek and other new AI models promise the same performance for one order of magnitude less power consumption - does this really change forecasts for load on the grid? China's battery exports are up 17.1% year-on-year in December by volume - but the dollar value was stuck at $60 billion for 2024, the same as previous years, as prices decline and volume expands. Shandong Province provides some statistics about the interaction between EV ownership, Virtual Power Plant expansion, and EV charging power demand.

The Trump Administration has quit the Paris Accords as is clearly opposed to wind power. But if the Administration doesn't support renewables, corporates will, as data centers add ever more load to the grid. The solar industry continues to post record manufacturing scale, demand, and low prices simultaneously - with Indian and US reshoring as the only dynamic stories alongside perovskite Comparing the capex costs between China and the West across different energy projects, it's clear that the bigger the project, the steeper the difference in investment cost - with HVDC lines, nuclear power, and offshore wind the most comparatively expensive in the West.

Hydrostor has received a $1.76 billion loan guarantee from the Biden Administration for its compressed-air energy storage project in California - how does this technology compare to BESS? Australia's Victoria state is the latest government to slash solar feed-in tariffs, which will force distributed solar development into further battery adoption. China alone will manufacture 1.4 TWh of batteries this year, including almost 1 TWh of power batteries.

Data center power demand will grow to between 6.7% and 12% of total US power demand by 2028, per a new report published by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - growing to fit the grid. China's green hydrogen industry has achieved $1.6 per kilogram green hydrogen, but this still isn't cheap enough for mass adoption over grey hydrogen. Europe's negative power price periods become ever more frequent, further incentivizing battery developments.

The global solar industry will install over 500 GW this year, with a final module cost of just $95 per kW as overcapacity continues to mount Nexwafe posts 24.4% cell efficiency built on its wafers made via epitaxial deposition - a significantly cheaper alternative for the solar supply chain Sodium-ion and vanadium-flow chemistries have continued growth in the energy storage segment despite lithium's dominance

China's export controls will spur further price increases for high-end semiconductor and other materials Battery prices set for consistent gradual decline through 2025 and beyond More investments into perovskite factories and pilot projects - is low-light performance good enough tyo conquer cloudy regions?

China's perovskite sector keeps announcing new factories - but what's needed to produce a Minimum Viable Product solar panel using the new semiconductor? Germany's 215 GW solar target for 2030 implies up to $100 billion investment also needed in energy storage batteries on the grid. Policy contrast widens on Chinese EV import tariffs between US exclusion, Australian free trade, and EU indecision.

Northvolt, Europe's flagship battery manufacturer, has filed for bankruptcy - in keeping with the region's weakness in upstream manufacturing. Entrion has patented a guyed monopile design which blurs the distinction between fixed-base and floating wind projects. China's government has issued tighter guidelines for solar manufacturing investments - in a case of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted.

China has exported 116 GWh of energy storage batteries and battery systems in the first 10 months of 2024, indicating 140 GWh full-year and a global manufacturing scale well north of 200 GWh, meaning the industry is grow between 50% and 100% year on year India became a net exporter of solar equipment in Q2 - and with President Trump in office, India is very likely to become the main supplier of solar wafers to the US industry in the future. All-solid-state batteries are still years away from being a mature product for the EV industry - but have begun to be used in the lucrative eVTOL market.

The EV industry's initial adoption of solid-state batteries remains set for 2027, just one of the quality upgrades which will offset the pain inflicted by tariffs. Global solar manufacturing has fallen by over one-third if you measure from the historic peak in March 2024 to October, with the industry's growth decelerating amidst module stockpiling, while price cannibalization forces investment into co-located battery energy storage. The looming Trump Administration has identified fracking CEO Chris Wright as its pick for Energy Secretary - but will oil and gas production really expand in such a way as to reduce energy prices, thus undercutting the motive to invest in renewables?

The second Trump Administration will disrupt the energy transition in three ways - disrupting equipment imports, cutting federal funding, and preserving the fossil fuel industry. Energy storage batteries will go from strength, with ever more price volatility including negative pricing on the one hand, and consistently low manufacturing costs on the other. Carbon fiber production capacity already reached 300,000 tons in 2023, with Chinese companies looking to double it again, allowing the wind industry to expand its usage of the expensive material.

In this episode of Rethink Energy Talks, we're joined by Paul Moonie, CEO of Australia's perovskite company Halocell, to discuss perovskites' performance in low-light conditions, dusk, and dawn - starting with a Microquanta test from a few months ago in which perovskites had 38% more usable light-hours under 75% cloud cover compared to standard silicon. We also discuss Halocell's various routes to market and research efforts.

In this week's episode, the Rethink Energy team discusses: The true price of China's solar panels - they're being sold below cost, but how far below cost? Carbon fiber production capacity is set to expand dramatically, courtesy of China, with just three factories in the past couple of months amounting to 82,000 tons - half of global demand India's $386 billion in energy transition finance pledges heavily feature solar manufacturing expansion - but how much wafer output will they achieve? Li Auto has disclosed some details of its AI-centered approach to Full Self Driving (FSD) development - including the size of its database and the scale and cost of the necessary computing capacity.

In this week's episode, the Rethink Energy team discusses: The 14th ICAO Air Navigation Conference has called for streamlining regulatory processes for implementing new aircraft designs which will accompany the adoption of sustainable aviation fuel, hydrogen and battery power. Rethink Energy has published a new forecast on perovskites - which will take over the solar industry by 2040, with certain segments being revolutionized ahead of 2030. Solar's quality improvements will keep rolling in through 2050 and beyond. Carbon fiber prices have almost halved in the past 14 months in China - allowing wider usage in wind turbines.

In this week's episode, the Rethink Energy team discusses: Tandem perovskite modules are being shipped to customers by Caelux, Oxford PV and others - these are still small-scale trial shipments, but this signifies that the technology has reached the threshold of parity on lifetime power output with conventional silicon modules. Per a new study from Boeing, 12% of global feedstock requirement for SAF could be met from South-East Asia alone - but SAF's logistical hurdles extend beyond simple creation of the feedstock. Typhoon Yagi has destroyed some wind turbines - but for the most part the disaster has acted as a proof of reliability for the new plus-size turbines deployed in south China.

In this week's episode, the Rethink Energy team discusses: Hydrogen has a little-explored route into the trucking segment, with hydrogen-fired combustion engines offering lower Capex than battery EVs. Australia has committed $1 billion AUD to solar manufacturing - but this only enough for the module segment, plus something more in the cell segment - maybe perovskites? Also in Australia, the value of curtailed energy per year, if stored and dispatched, is growing rapidly towards a similar $1 billion per year.

In this episode of Rethink Energy talks, we're joined by Tyler Hortin, CEO of Lion Energy, to discuss the future of battery energy storage in the US. That includes Lion Energy's use of technology such as EMS and BMS to optimise charge and discharge timing, integrating multiple demand and supply sources as well as accounting for electricity price variation on the grid. We also discuss the US reshoring agenda, the indefinite dominance of lithium-iron phosphate, and the rapid growth of the battery segment.

In this episode of Rethink Energy Talks we're joined by Nicola Battey, Director of Sustainability at Hometree - a residential installer of heat pumps, solar panels and batteries in the UK. We discuss the adoption of heat pumps and other residential energy systems - including why the UK is behind mainland Europe, and the abrupt rise to viability of batteries, even without a photovoltaic system.

In this week's episode, the Rethink Energy team discusses: South Korea's hydrogen fuel cell powered tram system, due for mid-2028 - and why such experiments should be shelved in favour of electric power. The US now has one wind turbine installation vessel (WTIV) compliant with the Jones Act - but its final cost came to $715 million, larger than the original $500 million price tag from back in 2020, and double the usual global price. This represents another cost factor hindering the nascent US offshore sector. JetZero's decision to go with sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) for its blended wing-body (BWB) airline design will prove a mistake in the long run, with hydrogen set to take over the industry over time. Natron Energy has announced a 24 GW sodium-ion battery factory in the US, geared towards short-duration, high-power applications such as EV fast charging infrastructure and securing industrial power supply.

In this week's episode, the Rethink Energy team discusses: Hazer Group's turquoise hydrogen production pilot scheme and whether the synthetic graphite byproduct will compensate for the cost of its high energy intensity. China has produced 100 GWh of energy storage batteries in H1 2024 - showing the continued rapid growth of the BESS industry to accompany wind and solar at scale. Ming Yang's 16.6 MW dual-rotor wind turbine has put out to sea - but floating wind is always going to be more expensive than fixed-base, which in turn is more expensive than onshore.

In this week's episode , the Rethink Energy team discusses: ClearVue's Building-Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV) glass, and the startup's latest agreement with Alu-Tec WLL to foster distribution of its products through the MENA region. Illinois has introduced a Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) incentive - not steep enough to close the gap with jet fuel, but another step toward the new industrial segment. NREL's latest offshore wind transmission research, which includes a description of a $100 billion intra-regional HVDC backbone stretching from North Carolina to New Hampshire - going far beyond the limited approach of connecting each project to the shore piecemeal.

In this week's episode , the Rethink Energy team discusses: Solar manufacturing output has stalled for the first time in over a decade, passing 50 GW a month in June 2023 - a level from which it first grew to 70 GW, before shrinking back to 50 GW in June 2024. This reinforces the reality of vast solar equipment stockpiles, and that the new limiting factor on project development is transmission. A hydrogen demonstrator flight should be achieved in 2026 by KLM and ZeroAvia - and with SAF-based pilot flights already achieved a few years back, that means the gap between the two aviation fuel routes has widened to the better part of a decade. But the bigger SAF gets, the bigger hydrogen, which is a feedstock for SAF, also has to become. And the slower hydrogen adoption is now, the more sudden and steep it will be when it finally takes off.

In this episode of Rethink Energy Talks, we're joined by Duncan Burt, the Chief Strategic Growth Officer at Reactive Technologies, a pioneering grid frequency stability company which measures the stability of power grids around the world. These measurements replace the old method of modelling - enabling grid operators to know for certain exactly how far they have to go to maintain the stability of the grid, whether by curtailing renewable outputs or investing in infrastructure. As much as 25% of all curtailment is already related to frequency concerns, rather than outright transmission constraints or excess supply compared to demand.

In this week's episode , the Rethink Energy team discusses: China's ammonia-coal co-firing pilot scheme, and how otherwise-curtailed renewable energy could help to make green ammonia affordable. China curtailed 17 GWh of its wind and solar in 2023. First Solar's TOPCon patent investigation which is looking to inconvenience its silicon-based rivals - and how First Solar will pursue next-gen photovoltaic technology in future, looking beyond single-junction. The offshore wind breakage issue, and how incidents like the recent one at Vineyard One will interfere with risk perception and project financing, even if there is no broader reliability problem lurking like the one which came out with Siemens Gamesa last year.

In this week's episode , the Rethink Energy team discusses: Oregon-based startup Origami Solar's plan to manufacture steel solar module frames for the US market - and how that matches up to aluminum. Archer Aviations' electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft are to be used as air taxis alongside Southwest Airlines' operations at Californian airports - but finding a profit margin may be tough. Chile and Saudi Arabia have announced monumental battery energy storage fleets - with Saudi's coming alongside a spate of Chinese solar panel and wind turbine factory announcements in the country.

In this week's episode , the Rethink Energy team discusses: Microquanta's perovskite test in Quzhou City indicates that even single-junction perovskites have an advantage over silicon PV with their performance under heavy cloud cover Shell's SAF facility pause calls into question the future of SAF, with cost concerns liable to see it lose market share in the future market to hydrogen

In this week's episode , the Rethink Energy team discusses: China's battery industry advance now includes the Chinese government assuming direct ownership of the rare earths sector. Fervo Energy commissions a 400 MW geothermal plant in Utah, the state's first - with EGS technology enabling geographically broader options for the geothermal industry. The 2024 US election is a threaten to the green hydrogen industry - but biofuels may retain bipartisan support.

In this episode the Rethink Energy team discusses: South Korean nuclear power's reported cost of just $40 per MWh on the Korea Power Exchange strikes a stark contrast with US newbuild nuclear LCOE of $180 per MWh based on the Vogtle 3&4 construction cost blowout - several explanations have to be brought to bear to explain this vast discrepancy. South Korea's nuclear power ambitions are being ramped up consistently under President Yoon, with billions allotted to R&D around Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and a pilot project pink hydrogen production scheme being agreed this month.

In this episode the Rethink Energy team discusses: The latest SNEC Exhibition in Shanghai, the biggest conference in the solar industry, shows that technological upgrading continues, with some silicon PV modules over 25%, and the first perovskites brought to market by Microquanta and Utmolight in the BIPV sector. Norway's hydropower fleet is getting gradually outscaled by rising electricity demand - prompting the country to join the ranks of Nordic governments considering a nuclear-powered energy strategy.

Conrad Oakey of Novatech Automation, which runs 25% of US substations, joins us to discuss grid automation. The US grid is seeing a resurgence of demand growth amidst supply chain re-onshoring, EV adoption, and data center build out. It's also changing in quality, with demand and supply becoming much less predictable over time. "You have to electrify and automate everything in order to reach net-zero on time." says Oakey. "Those devices in your house, that grid-forming inverter on your solar panel, needs communication with the grid. And as the grid becomes more and more varied in its generation sources, we have to sense and adapt, rather than the old mode of plan and predict. That means more points of measurement and automation and control, with-fidelity and low-latency data for system operators."