Redefining Energy

Northvolt, once the poster child of the European battery industry, shocked the world last month by filling for Chapter 11 in the United States.  The Swedish battery start-up burned through billions of euros in capital from investors such as Volkswagen, Goldman Sachs, and others, with little to show for it. Laurent and Gerard conduct a postmortem on this debacle of epic proportions. With access to...

Deploying solar and heat pumps in the residential sector is all well and good, but many attempts to scale have unfortunately failed. Beyond the king Octopus, Simon Phelan and his company Hometree have managed to become an unlikely challenger in the deployment of the Energy transition inside home. And Simon has achieved this feat by flipping the system onto his head. Hometree is a company that offe...

Laurent goes live to Baku COP29 to discuss with Bruce “Almighty” Douglas, CEO Global Renewable Alliance and tireless promoter of Renewable Energy. He is the one who coins the famous “Triple Renewables” rallying cry, and has been rewarded by joining the precious list of TIME 100 Climate leaders. With Bruce, Laurent dives into COP. Shambolic, Rudderless and Essential nevertheless. The world of renew...

As COP29 begins, the ripple effects of the re-election of Donald Trump are reaching the shores of the Caspian Sea.   COP28 welcomed 85,000 delegates, within which a significant contingent of Oil lobbyists. COP29 is supposed to be the “Finance COP”, whatever that means, but all major head of states will not participate. What to expect from COP29?   Are COP still useful? Is it the correct format? Wh...

First, Gerard is sorry, he couldn’t make it as he was on a ship in the Irish Sea, and his Starlink wouldn’t connect. So, it is just Laurent interviewing a young superstar, Peter Paul van Voorst, CEO of the mobile battery management platform Skoon. Skoon, based in Rotterdam, is now seven years old and manages more than 1,000 mobile batteries in 14 countries. Mobile batteries range from 1kw to 1MW a...

Gerard and Laurent welcome Kristian Ruby, secretary general of Eurelectric, about their new report entitled “Power Barometer – Zeroing in on Electrification”.   To quote the IEA, we enter in the “Age of Electrification” where electrification rate is going to accelerate significantly. We have an extensive conversation about the good news (growth of renewables, energy security progress in response t...

What are VPP? Virtual Power Plants. What are DER? Distributed Energy Resources? As the grid becomes more intermittent while the load is growing, those VPP/DER platforms provide a critical role by shedding demand, sometimes for a few minutes, to alleviate stress on the Grids. VPPs can avoid starting polluting peakers via pre-agreed and targeted demand reduction, shift consumption via batteries and...

While Gerard is doing his rock star concert at TedTalk Berlin, Laurent has invited an old friend, Roger Atkins, Top Voice on EVs to discuss the people behind the EV revolution.   Roger has a 40 year career in the Auto industry (half of them in EVs) and his cowboy hat makes him a fixture of great EV shows around the world. Roger talk about his encounters with Robin Zeng -  CEO CATL, Wang Chuanfu –...

The battery infrastructure is currently growing 3x faster than the solar industry. Records are beaten daily: in August 2024, for the first time, Chinese battery factories passed the 100GWh production mark. We are seeing industry giants consolidate their leadership while hopes of alternative technologies or promising start ups are being squashed. The prices are collapsing monthly, partly due to che...

Gerard is live on the Wisdom Tree Commodity Exchange podcast and delivers a masterclass on how to invest in the Energy Transition: Renewables, Equity, Innovation, Commodities.   ----- Laurent will be keynote speaker at ReSource Amsterdam 24-25/10/24. Come say hello https://resource-platform.eu/events/re-source-2024-event/   -----   We also salute the latest edition of Mycle Schneider World Nuclear...

ExxonMobil forecasts 2050 Oil demand be the same as today. We believe that they are just “talking their books.” To discuss the future of the Energy system as well as the fight against Climate Change, we bring in a very respected expert and friend of the show: Kingsmill Bond, Energy Strategist at RMI. Kingsmill has been digging deep into the data and has realized that the fossil fuel cohort simply...

As Europe has reached 270GW wind power (vs 150GW USA), corresponding to a value of 500bnEUR, we dig into the value of those assets. Gerard being out, Laurent brought his friend Mortimer Menzel, Managing Partner of Augusta Co, one of the most seasoned investment bankers in the wind sector. After describing the past gloom (interest rates, inflation, supply chain, Ukraine), we analyse the fundamental...

As wind and solar become ubiquitous, the value of hydropower goes up. Hydropower is becoming the ultimate clean energy, as it is flexible and easily dispatchable. Hydropower is concentrated in certain geographies (China, Brazil, Canada) and is almost entirely developed by State-Owned Utilities that can stomach and support the very long construction time. Bost costs and value should be measured in...

“Summer has come and passed / The innocent can never last / Wake me up when September ends”. Like John Wick, Laurent thinks he is back. So we have a very energetic Minutes to start September. With Gerard, the co-hosts focus on one of the key trends of 2024 which they call “Batteries, the Great Consolidation”. A lot of great experts are helping shape our view. To name a few Aaron Wade, Tom Tsogt, C...

How to decarbonise buildings? That’s an important topic because that sector accounts for 37% of all emissions, making it one of the three pillars of decarbonisation next to electricity generation and transportation. Progress has been mixed. If lighting is an incredible success, heating and cooling remain a complex proposition with certain countries adopting new technologies much faster than others...

A special interview with one of the great minds of the Energy Transition. Dr. Doug Arent is the Executive Director of Strategic Public– Private Partnerships at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, U.S and Distinguished Fellow, World Economic Forum.   He just published a book called “Our Renewable Energy Future: The Story of How Renewables will become the Basis for Our Live...

During Summer season, we bring you back the best of our sister show, Redefining Energy TECH, where host Michael Barnard invites Paul Martin for a very long and geekie conversation about innovative solutions for industrial heat. Two titans of our industry. Paul Martin, a seasoned chemical engineer, share his profound insights on the electrification of industrial heat processes. Here’s a brief summa...

In episode 143, Gerard, Laurent and Michael have discussed the philosophy of Bill Gates when it comes to the Energy Transition, and the root causes of his flawed thesis. Let see now if this transpires in his main investment vehicle, Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV). Michael Barnard is quite blunt: “To be clear, Gates is still highly resistant to the reality that we have almost all of the solutio...

Bill Gates is sucking a lot of oxygen in the Energy Transition. Is he a force for good, or a nuisance? What is his thesis and where does it come from? And is the thesis still valid in 2024 or obsolete? In this episode, we will not analyse Breakthrough Energy Ventures, his VC fund celebrating its 10th anniversary. That will be the topic of Episode 144, next week. Laurent, Gerard and Michael are goi...

This week, it is a solo by Gerard Reid. This is the audio of its remarkable presentation at EcoSummit Berlin in June 2024. The topic is “Batteries vs Hydrogen” Link to the YouTube   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAbr4byi414

Texas and California have witnessed a crazy growth in Solar and Batteries in recent years. In 2024 California has 24GW of Solar and 9GW of batteries on its grid; Texas has grown even faster with 31GW of Solar and 10GW of batteries. When it comes to the Energy Transition, you can make the following analogy: public policies are the land and financial markets are the rain. But the seeds are battle-ha...

After a crazy Intersolar in Munich which welcomed more than 120,000 visitors, the pace of Solar deployment in Europe is going exponentially. Gerard and Laurent bring in Walburga Hemetsberger, CEO of Solar Power Europe, to discuss the development of Solar, and through the new report “Mission Solar 2040”, how we are on the cusp of a Flexibility Revolution. The Report is available here: https://www.s...

Glencore’s CEO Gary Nagle has once described ESG as “some person in the basement in office number 27 engaged in a box-ticking exercise.” And a lot of fossil fuel companies – while being less explicit – share the same opinion on ESG… and have voiced their hostility indirectly through complicit media outlets. The ESG movement is facing a significant backlash. On the one hand there has been too much...

We bring in Nick Wayth, CEO of Energy Institute (EI), for the release of the 73rd Edition of the Statistical Review of World Energy. The Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy™ analyses data on world energy markets from the prior year. Previously produced by bp, the Review has been providing timely, comprehensive and objective data to the energy community since 1952. The Strategic Rev...

UK is at the nexus of the subsea interconnector’s new economy. Great Britain is connected to Continental Europe by 8 interconnectors representing up to 15% of its power consumption. Subsea cables are now a growing industry because of the benefits they bring to the grids, such as resiliency, capacity, lower prices, and renewable energy balancing. Alongside batteries and pumped Hydro, interconnector...