Rethink Energy Podcast

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.