Rethink Energy Podcast

In this final episode of the Rethink Energy Podcast, consultant Ed Ho makes a return appearance to conclude our discussion of the nuclear power topic. This time, the main topic is the near and medium-term outlook for the industry's development, as it heads towards a revival across the West.

The US will default to a nuclear-centric energy strategy as nuclear enjoys bipartisan support from policymakers - unlike either renewables or fossil fuel plants. More broadly worldwide, the growing need to pair intermittent renewables with energy storage is eroding their perceived cost advantage over nuclear energy - although this depends on local wind and solar conditions. China now accounts for...

Flying cars are being brought to market by several major EV manufacturers in 2025 and 2026 - and their demand for weight efficiency will boost adoption of autonomous driving and all-solid-state batteries, even if those technologies are too expensive for standard EVs. Chinese OEMs have unveiled a new tranche of proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzers as the SNEC exhbition - bringing cost-effec...

Rio Tinto has announced a further $900 million investment into lithium mining in Chile - we discuss the inexorable logic that today's 2x overcapacity will give way, due to constantly growing demand, to a second lithium shortage within the next 10 years. JinkoSolar's whitepaper on their latest TOPCon solar module, which boasts 24.8% efficiency, demonstrates that technological progress in si...

With Republicans sabotaging renewables and Democrats bound to push out fossil fuels, nuclear stands to benefit as the 'least interfered with' option. President Trump has signed a new EO upping the Biden 2050 target of 200 GW, to 400 GW of nuclear power - to include 10 constructions beginning by 2030, and this is backed by data center hyperscalers, which combine massive future electricity demand gr...

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 t...

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 growt...

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...

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 a...

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, the...

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. Sola...

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 renew...

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 n...

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 main...

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 &quot...

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...

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 projects Some perovskite solar manufacturers have raised the funding they need to fund mass pr...

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 trilemma A 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 pro...

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 p...

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 W...

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...

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...