The Rethink Energy Podcast complements the Rethink Energy weekly strategy bulletin, as we dive deeper into the dynamic factors of the energy market. We discuss the week’s key issues, while providing insight into our own research and forecasts to give clearer direction of where momentum is building through the energy transition.
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-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.
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. Weather forecast data is useful for everything from siting wind and solar plants on the basis of long-term expectations, to deciding when to discharge batteries in light of the supply and demand situation – significantly driven by weather – over the course of the next few days. It can even be used to determine the best time for power plant maintenance operations.
Meteomatics is a Swiss company established across Europe and expanding its operations in the US – especially Texas.
-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.
-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.