Superconducting Transmission CEO Talks Grids In Brussels – CleanTechnica

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When I was in Brussels recently speaking at the launch of the second edition of Supergrid Super Solution, Eddie O’Connor and Kevin O’Sullivan’s handbook for Europe’s renewable power grid of the future, I had the opportunity to sit down with John Fitzgerald, CEO of Supernode, a startup developing superconducting transmission. Here’s the embedded podcast and lightly edited transcript of the first half of our conversation.

Michael  Barnard (MB): Hi, welcome back to Redefining Energy Tech. I’m your host, Michael  Barnard. My guest today is John  Fitzgerald, CEO of superconducting transmission startup Supernode. And we’re in Brussels for the book launch of the second edition of the book Super Grid. If you haven’t got a copy, get it now. John, welcome. 

John Fitzgerald (JF):  Thanks for having me, Michael.

MB: As always with these things, I like to start with who the person is. I mean, you’re a CEO of a superconducting transmission company, which is pretty cool and nerdy. But how did you get here? What’s your background and story? 

JF: There’s quite a background, but I’m really an energy supply industry person. I came out of college, I did engineering. My folks were school teachers. I loved engineering. And I was lucky enough to get a job when I graduated way back in 1991 with the local utility company. And they were the A to Z of electricity. They did everything from selling your fridge, you know, the supply company, the distribution company, to generation company. So I worked for them in their nerve center, their control center, and system ops. So I started off scheduling generators and it was before they’d open up the markets at all. So it was just a single monopoly company doing everything. And that was interesting. Five years later they opened it up and things started changing. 

And I did an MBA and the utility company ESB sponsored me to go to university, do an MBA. And the firm advice I got was to leave the national control center and do something different or what you’ve learned won’t stand to you. So I did that and I started developing power stations, combined cycle gas turbine infrastructure and power stations outside of our home jurisdiction. Because if people were going to come into our backyard, were going to go into other people’s backyard. So that whole thing started. And so it was all about spark spreads and trading and developing business development. And that did that for six years or so and did some trading over interconnectors and bought some gas, bought and sold electricity, made some money doing it. 

And then I got a phone call from a new company, EirGrid TSO, who’d just been set up and they had no assets. And because of EU Directive 9692, they couldn’t let the incumbent develop interconnection because they felt there was a conflict of interest there, which is understandable. So they gave it to a new company and they Contacted me and invited me to deliver an interconnection. So we built the EastWest Interconnector, started in 2007, finished on time, below budget in 2012 as requested, which was pretty cool. 

MB: Where’s the east and where’s the west? 

JF: It’s from Ireland to the UK. It’s the first link and it was the first of its kind at the time. It employs, at the time it was a new enough technology called voltage source conversion. So a lot of the existing interconnectors would have been line commutated. So they would have been big interconnectors between strong parts of the network and. 

MB: Usually back to back with LCC. 

JF: Quite often, but sometimes long distance as well. But you need a strong network to do the conversion, whereas with voltage source conversion you don’t. You can build, you can black start, you can build a sign your side from a D.C. Source. So it’s quite neat technology. It’s about as cool as it gets for nerdy engineers and electrical engineers. So we built that and it’s still operational in its first year or two of operation. Because of the market mechanisms, they were able to assess its impact on the market prices in Ireland and prices have gone down by about 14%, which is pretty cool. 

And, and that’s why we built it. But as we were building it, the renewables thing was kicking off, so it effectively became an overflow valve. So when the wind blew hard over the Atlantic and we had excess renewables, we were able to sell them to the UK, who wouldn’t have as much excess renewables. They would have a lot of renewables but not as much excess. And when it didn’t blow, we could import all kinds of electricity. So it was a really nice project. And when we finished that, I got promoted to look after all the grid developments. So that includes overhead transmission, connecting data centers, connecting wind farms, further interconnection with France and elsewhere, exploring interconnection and operating interconnection. 

So I did that for five or six years and that was challenging and in a way it felt like running to a standstill because every time you satisfied a customer, there were two more customers looking for more of the same. And yesterday, please. So that was really, I think in 2017 we connected a record amount of onshore wind, a huge amount of data load and eventually it became very demanding. I think the plan was to build a big, much bigger grid, overhead AC transmission, Right around the country. And Ireland is a bit like the canary in the coal mine. We’ve had a lot of penetration of renewables on a small, pretty isolated system, much sooner than other countries had. So we’ve got a very high SNSP, which is an acronym called System Non Synchronous Penetration. 

So we can get up to 75%, 80% and that’s quite a lot with very little inertia on your system when you’ve got that much wind. But you need a lot of grids to move it around because it’s not co-located with demand. It’s typically in rural places. So you need a lot more assets to make sure you can accommodate that wind and give it the, you know, we’ve brilliant load factors. But to realize those you need grids you need to minimize curtailment and congestion and effectively turn them down. Public consultation became a big part of my job. Spending time explaining to people why we needed to put some serious infrastructure in their backyard. And it wasn’t really a big hit, you know. So I would meet with the politicians and the policymakers and they would be very supportive of the strategy. 

In the parliament in Dublin where the infrastructure wasn’t going when they went home at the weekend, it was a different kettle of fish. So they were getting it in the neck. And some people lost their seats because they supported transmission projects. And there are large linear projects that go through constituencies pretty much like a lightning rod. So they’re hard. I don’t think we built very much. When I started the whole program was in some difficulty and we had a major infrastructure project to Northern Ireland which I got planning for in both jurisdictions. It still hasn’t been built. So running to a standstill, an opportunity arose, some change in personnel. And I met Eddie O’Connor and Eddie invited me to join him to set up a company. And he was looking at it from the outside. He was a renewables developer. 

He developed a huge amount of renewables and he saw that the cost of the connections was just becoming a bigger and bigger part of the project cost and bigger part of the constraints to delivering value and so on. So we’re really a business to lab rather than vice versa. So we didn’t invent super conductivity or anything like it. We saw a problem and we explored the market to see what we could do to help improve the scale and pace of which transmission grids could be rolled out to meet the needs of society. Yeah. 

MB: There’s a lot to unpack there. Let’s start with your time with EirGrid. So what are your top three takeaways for? So domestic transmission 1. Your top three learnings versus interconnectors. Define the differences between those things and think about what your insights are. 

JF: I guess there’s a lot of pressure on businesses that have been pretty stable for 50 years. There was a lot of margin I suppose. First takeaway is that the low hanging fruit is gone. The margins that have been built in the 50s, 60s and 70s have been eaten up. A lot of technology has been employed but more needs to be rolled out. So they’re still not using all the innovative technology they could. There’s definitely an asymmetry of risk and reward. So nobody’s going to thank you for not buying an IBM in that business because your job is to keep the lights on and innovating and keeping the lights on are not happy bedfellows. That’d be another takeaway. I guess the scale and pace of change and the toolbox inadequacy would be my big takeaways. 

MB: Talk about the toolbox inadequacy. What things were missing and what things are missing now. 

JF: When you’re inside a utility you do tend to have a fixed mindset that the tools available to you are set and you’ve just got to consult with people and tell them that they’ve got to accept the way the world is. And that’s all there is. And the reality of it is AC undergrounding is very difficult over long distances because the cables charge up, you can’t switch them. So there’s a limit to how much undergrounding you can do. And I did a fair bit of it. And so that would be a major, a major issue to the toolbox. But also DC is not as utilized in Europe and in America as it is in other parts of the world, namely China. 

So our readiness to deploy it because if you think about it, you’re sitting in a control center, you charge with keeping the lights on and you’ve got this black box and that you bought off somebody that’s waiting to do something on toward. Whereas to date everything has just responded to the inertia of the system. You big spinning machines giving you all the energy you need. And now all of a sudden you’ve got this rule set in a control system and that’s there waiting to cause you a problem. So there is a reluctance to use it. So I would say the toolbox being AC overhead is the only way to do terrestrial long distance transmission and I say long distance. I mean, 2, 300 kilometers is probably challenging because it’s so difficult to get the planning and consent. 

MB: Let’s nerd out a little bit because you used a bunch of terms, and a quarter of my audience will know exactly what you’re talking about. Another quarter will have heard many of these terms, and another 50% will be going, okay, Mike, get nerdy. So you’ve mentioned inertia, you’ve mentioned non synchronous. You mentioned alternating current AC and direct current dc. So kind of step through the key components that the transmission has to provide and that lack of inertia versus inertia, things like that. 

JF: Yeah, well, I’ll probably step away from the inertia and the synchronous bit. That’s just something that system operators have to deal with. In terms of the infrastructure you can put for moving power from A to B, you can do it using AC or DC transmission. And AC is alternating at 50 Hz or 60 Hz in the US in other jurisdictions. And DC is just rock solid just sitting there. And you have a plus and a minus for dc. Dc, you can go underground for as long as you want. You can also go overhead, but typically it’s employed in subsea settings and where you want to be underground. And it’s really good at doing that. Ac, it’s good for moving voltages. You can transform, you can go from distribution up to transmission. Our motors work nicely off it, and it’s very familiar. So it’s predominant. 

95% of our grids today are AC. They have certain limitations when it comes to undergrounding. So if you put too much underground, the higher the voltage, the less you can underground because the charging current becomes so high. It’s the Ferranti effect for some of the nerds there. So it’s where the cable actually charges and you’re not able to switch it in and switch it out. So it causes voltage problems on the system. So underground AC cables are used, but only over very short distances. Now, people would like to have them over longer distances because they don’t like looking at pylons, but that’s challenging because you need compensation. So you need to put in pretty heavy equipment that limits flexibility and are costly. 

And compensation has been used in some of the North Sea ac, offshore wind connections, where they wanted to go underground underwater, but they wanted to do it by ac. They needed compensation. 

MB: For context, for people who are listening, this is all about transmission. It’s not about the distribution of the wires that come to your home. That’s all alternating current and it’s all much lower voltage. I’m getting an interesting look [from John]. 

JF: So correct. People ask me, is this backbone or is it a connection or what is it like? Ultimately there’s a voltage and current on every cable and that’s how you move electricity from A to B. And superconductivity, which is the technology that we’re innovating with at the moment. I wouldn’t say we’re innovating the superconductivity piece. We’re innovating around how you keep that superconducting 247 reliably, competitively. That bit can work in distribution settings too because they have congestion, they have to move a lot of power. There is a project that ComEd have kicked off in Chicago and it’s the Resilient Energy Grids project and that is around moving transmission levels of power so maybe 50, 100 megawatts at low voltages. 

So what they want to do is use distribution, use superconductors to make it able to do transmission level voltages and connect up some bulk supply points in downtown Chicago that otherwise would be tails. So if there was a problem, there’d be reliability issues. So what they’re doing is they’re connecting up a couple of bulk supply points and that will give more resilience to the customers of downtown Chicago. And that’s the genesis of the Resilient Energy grids project that ComEd have kicked off there with their partners, the SO distribution, I just see a problem. I want to move power from A to B. Superconductors are really good on the distribution system where there’s urban congestion. Because what they represent, and this is back to the toolbox. Was the toolbox fixed? 

If I want to move power from A to B, how am I going to do it? I can put it in a battery and move it on a truck from A to B. That’s not very practical. I can use higher voltage cables and that might cause me issues with upgrading transmission stations, distribution stations. Or I can do it at a lower voltage and move more current at a lower voltage and get the same power. Because people don’t really want to buy voltage off you, they don’t want to buy current off you. They want to buy your power, they want your energy, they want utility from it. So the superconducting piece, we’ll get started. 

MB: We’ll get more into superconducting later. I want to just set the groundwork first. You’ve talked about alternating current transmission, typically on overhead pylons. Most people in the developed world, when they see wires running overhead on the big pylons across the countryside, that’s alternating current. And it’s going back and forth at the frequency we’re talking about and creating a big magnetic fields, which is why the wires have to be separated and they don’t want to be underground because it increases resistance and you lose lots of the energy and just gets hard to use. You can’t put them underwater either. Same problem as underground. And direct current doesn’t flip back and forth, doesn’t create the same kind of magnetic fields, doesn’t have the skin effect for people who really want to nerd out about transmission. By the way, I recorded an episode with Cornelis Plet. He’s a PhD in power engineering. 

JF: I know Cornelis. 

MB: Great guy. He’s actually in North America running the power division for DNV now. 

JF: That’s right. He’s on some of the CIGRÉ working groups. I think he looks after the offshore HVDC group. They’re looking at offshore grids. Yeah. So overhead, the reason why the wires are so far apart and the bigger, the higher the voltage, the bigger the pylons. And the reason there is because they’re air insulated, so you’re not using insulation so you can run more current through them. And it’s the cheapest way of moving power from A to B. You cannot compete with it. It is just a really economic way of moving power from A to B. The issue is, in the developed world, a lot of people don’t like looking at them. If they’re there, they’ll accept them, but if they’re coming, they’ll worry about them and there’ll be a lot of confusion, all sorts of shenanigans going on. 

Concerns genuine, some people stirring up social media. And again, the jobs are probably in a different state, a different county. So what’s it doing for me? My lights work. Maybe 50 years ago, people wanted electricity, so they welcomed people into their home. They thought they were privileged to get the light bulb working. That day is gone. It’s well socialized and expected that they’re going to have electricity and they flick that switch. They want to have the lights working all the time. So ac back to the AC and the dc. The AC is a really good way of moving it, but it’s not very popular because of the visual disamenity associated with it. Yeah. 

MB: Direct current, you can put it underwater, you can put it underground. I recently did analysis of all of the global HVDC systems in the world. I got all the data and I did some analysis, cruddy analysis, because it’s not like I have professional grade data sets. I have lke Wikipedia and there’s an organization that tracks all the new VSC projects . And so I have those data sets. But still it amazed me in Europe how many of them were hybrid. They’d come on shore, they’d go overhead for a while, then they go underground for a while. So the same transmission line for DC would have three different modes. 

JF: Yeah, And DC can be overhead too. Like the overhead on the ground is if it’s overhead, you just have the conductor hanging from some kind of an insulator string and separated from the positive or the negative or alternatively from the other phases. So there are DC overhead lines. In fact, the biggest circuit in the world is a DC overhead line in China and it’s 12 gigawatts and it’s 1100 KV. So the pylons are enormous. 

MB: And it’s like 3000 kilometers or something like that from the Three Gorges Dam into the Pearl River Delta region of China. 

JF: Yeah, it’s the Shanghai type area where there’s a huge amount of demand for power. And that’s an incredible project. But the DC like they can both be put overhead or underground. But if the AC is underground, what happens is they, you have to insulate it. So you have to wrap the conductor in an insulator. And that insulator changes its electrical behavior and causes it to be a massive capacitor. And that’s, that’s why D.C. Can go underground for very long distances and A.C. Can’t. 

MB: The higher, you know, once again for the nerdy fans here, what’s a capacitor versus in this context? 

JF: So the capacitor is like a storage heater. It’s a brick or something that will store charge and charge up and you’ll put a voltage on it and it will charge and discharge just pretty much like a battery or a storage heater. So they would be capacitive type devices. And so there’s, you’ve got your resistance, you’ve got your reductance and you’ve got your capacitance and capacitance, you Get a charging current and you get a discharging current. And that limits, you know, the efficacy of what you’re trying to do, which is transmit power from A to B. So at a certain point, you can transmit no power on an AC circuit because of the capacitance. Its effective transfer capacity just reduces to zero. And the objective is to move power from A to B, not to, you know, have voltage or circuits in the ground. So that’s the objective. 

MB: Let’s talk interconnectors because interconnects are something that’s been emerging for 50 or 60 years and maybe longer, but from an HVDC perspective, it was like, what is it, 57 or something like that, the first one in Sweden. 

JF: I think they had a mercury valve connecting the north and south island down in New Zealand. Obviously, the first ones were in Scotland, up in Sweden, where ASEA pretty much innovated things. 

MB: When I first encountered HVDC, I was looking at archipelago nations as an obvious place where they’d be highly evaluated.  Japan, archipelago nation. You know, some people don’t know this, but I figured out there’s 400 islands that make up the UK British Isles agglomeration. It’s just a huge number of islands. And so, you know, that ability of direct current to go underwater is highly advantageous there. Now you were developing interconnectors to France as well. 

JF: Yeah. The Celtic Interconnector. 

MB: And is that one in operation? How many are in operation right now between Europe and the. What’s the right term I should be using here? 

JF: The British Isles. Originally, there’s the IFA interconnector and then there was IFA 2, which was England, France, and now there’s the one in the Channel Tunnel and that link. There’s a ton of them. There’s Nemo. I’d say there’s nearly just probably a dozen in Britain alone. And there’s three. There’s two operational between Ireland and Britain at the moment, and there is another one commissioning this year. They’re probably just waiting for a snag list from the local utility one side or the other. And the Celtic Interconnector is due to be operational next year. So somewhere, I guess, would say around 15 between the two islands and the mainland. 

MB: It’s a lot. Japan was an early leader in HVDC, mostly LCC back to backs because they had their islands run different alternating current grids. But they’ve just stalled after that there. You know, it’s very interesting. Why is what’s different do you think about the regulatory and grid environment in the British Isles that’s led to this much dc? 

JF: Yeah, I think what drove DC and interconnection projects was the delta in prices between markets. So one of the early significant, one of the longest interconnectors that was built was the Nornet interconnector about 15 years ago and in its first year of operation it completely paid for itself because you’d Scandinavian Hydro being pumped straight into the Dutch market which was operating a gas spark spread. So the price was much higher. So that’s what drove interconnection. The motivation was to reduce congestion but also to arbitrage market prices. In between Ireland and the UK it’s now been driven to a great extent by renewables. In Japan, I guess it’s down to generation mix and the need. Obviously if they have pumped storage in both Honu and Hokkaido, then do they need more interconnection and what’s the case? 

TEPCO are the utility in Honu, probably in Hokkaido too. I’m not familiar with the whole setup over there. But if they need it, they certainly have the wherewithal to procure it. So I don’t know why they didn’t buy more. Maybe they feel they have enough for now. 

MB: Certainly it’s one of those places where what happens in Japan is weird compared to in many other places. After Fukushima there was a significant recalibration of the market and opening up and liberalization of the power market. It’s going to be interesting to see how long that takes to run through. I’ve done a power analysis for Japan and looked at where they could put offshore wind, where they could put interconnectors. Most of the reasons they don’t have it are political because it’s China, it’s South Korea and you know, so. 

JF: Yeah, but politics plays a role and one of the things that amazes me is that there’s not a single grid and given that you have a federal government in the USA that they don’t have a single grid, that there’s three asynchronous grids operating and sometimes folks in one area don’t have as much energy as they need. And while folks in another area have an excess and they don’t have the political barriers that for historic reasons or political reasons we have in Europe and exist in Asia too, where it’s not just doesn’t make sense to interconnect. It is do I like them, do I want to interconnect with those people? There’s a whole lot of things going to mix. Japan, I have some Japanese relations. 

My brother in law married a Japanese lady and like I was talking to him yesterday about the car industry there. Why have Toyota not embraced electric vehicles to the same extent as Nissan who were one of the early leaders with the Nissan Leaf? And sometimes you’re shaped more by what you value and what you are and you’re a Honda and you’ve got a fantastic engine. Maybe you don’t want to turn your back on all the great work you did where some companies have got zero track records in the combustion engine. Never even bothered. In fact there are probably some car companies who don’t even know whether there’s people in the companies don’t even understand how a combustion engine works. 

MB: My observation about Toyota and hydrogen for example, is that in Japanese society frequently some illustrious man has to die before they can change to a better path so that he won’t lose face. 

JF: Yeah, I would expect there’s a bit of that going on. 

MB: Yeah, but so we’ve got those interconnectors now. What is the value of interconnectors for renewables? Because you said first it was driven by price because there was a gap in terms of cheap Swedish energy and expensive demand. A place you could sell it for a lot more in Denmark. And then there was just some renewables. So what’s the renewables doing? 

JF: Yeah, Nornet was Norway. The renewables are really like the Irish system is an interesting one and there are others like it. It’s not the. It’s not the only one, but it’s got very high penetration of renewables. But there are some times when the wind doesn’t blow at all. So we need another generation fleet to keep the lights on when the wind isn’t blowing. And the value of interconnection is when the wind doesn’t blow. You have a form of capacity where you can import your energy from another country where they have excess capacity at that point in time. 

So security of supply is a big driver for interconnection in terms of selling excess renewables and the logic of national grids and national networks like what renewables do because of their variability and their intermittency, they just completely bring that to a continental scale because there’s, you know, if you have a continental scale grid, like we did some studies with some researchers from UCD there, I used a royal we, the researchers did the work and I talked about it. 

MB: But did you take credit for it? 

JF: No. You have to draw the lines maybe a little bit. But they did a study and they basically said if you had an infinite bus bar in Europe, what would it mean in terms of energy prices and the cost of energy? So let’s say grids were not a constraint. And they looked at all the targets that all the member states in Europe came up with for decarbonization and they spread it all over Europe exactly as the countries had said they wanted to do it. And they threw in a large amount of storage. They looked at the cost savings compared to business as usual and they were about 40%. And then they put in, took away a little bit of the capacity and said, okay, let’s have a grid that’s halfway between business as usual and nirvana. 

And it was about 30% cheaper. But what that showed was there are huge energy flows that need to happen between member states. And I think there was an event on the system about two or three years ago now it might be five, where there was a fire somewhere in the southwest of France and the entire Iberian Peninsula that Spain and Portugal were disconnected for about two days from the rest of the continental grid. And if you think about the amount of solar and wind that you can get between the offshore and the onshore and how rich the Iberian Peninsula is in renewals, it just beggars belief that a single event can disconnect that and that the grid there is fit for purpose or big enough to realize the ambitions. 

So I think bigger grids definitely needed probably something like three times as much grids as we have today. 

MB: It’s an interesting one because California is famous for the duck curve. And they’re solving the duck. They’re in a single time zone. There’s a fairly narrow chunk of western United States and the duck curve, just all the solar comes on at the same time in the state and it all goes away at the state and it doesn’t overlap 100% with peak demand periods. And so all the other generation in the state goes off and all the storage just sucks up all that excess. And people who can charge and run their hot water heaters and stuff during the bottom part of the peak. I mean I remember the first time I priced, looked at the price, the retail price of electricity in California at mid afternoon like 2 o’clock it was 45 cents a kilowatt hour US that was like 10 or 15 years ago and now that’s the cheapest time to buy electricity because there’s so much of it. But to your point, those HVDC interconnectors, we run them east, west, that duck curve, your duck curve in Ireland becomes somebody else’s couple of time zones away, high demand period. And so you can just time shift electrical, solar generation and reduce the amount of storage you need locally and vice. 

JF: Versus when we don’t have much wind and we can import from other countries who have excess renewables and fall back on storage. So you actually need some long duration energy storage as well. But with the mix there you can decarbonize. It’s going to take, it’s going to take a bit of effort. It’s, I think we’ve done the easy bit and I think the second part is going to be a bit tougher. 

MB: Well, it’s getting kind of crazy. Singapore I think last week or the week before approved the first necessary approval phase for Sun Cable. 

JF: Okay. To Australia. 

MB: Yeah. So Australia. Mike Cannon Brooks, who’s the sensible Australian, although Forrest is actually becoming sensible again and putting his hydrogen plans on hold. He was down the wrong path for a while. Heart in the right place, thermodynamically in the wrong place. But they were actually partners in Sun Cable and they disagreed because Forest wanted to do a lot of hydrogen and Mike Forrest Brooks wanted to ship electrons to the center of ASEAN or the economic center of ASEAN, Singapore, where I lived for a couple of years. I actually know the guy who does power strategy there and it’s like I keep saying to him it’s going to be interconnect, solar, wind and stuff. You don’t need nuclear. But so that’s approved. That’s 3,600 kilometers running along the ridge of a really big archipelago. Like I think it’s 6,000 occupied islands out of 17,000 Indonesia. It’s nutty. 

JF: So yeah, it’s big scale. Like the scale of it is incredible. But you can see Singapore doesn’t have a lot of space for renewables in Australia have a hell of a lot. 

MB: I actually did the math because I was living there. You could put enough renewables on their housing development blocks. Like 80% of the people live in what’s their version of public housing, which is extraordinary. It’s like such an intelligent way to do things and provide about 15% of the energy for the HDB because they’re 12 stories multi unit residential buildings. You just don’t have a lot of rooftop and so they’ve got a lot of flat rooftops. They’re going to do a lot of commercial and industrial, but they don’t have a lot of room. They can’t put any wind turbines up. Not that it’s a great place for wind turbines. So this interconnector is really a great way to do it. There’s another one. Are you familiar with Laurel Segalan’s NATO-L project? 

JF: Yes. Is this the North Atlantic project? Yeah, I am, yeah. You know, not intimately, but I’m aware of it. 

MB: I’ll share a couple of details because it’s cool. It roughly follows the first Atlantic communication cables route from 1865. There’s a plateau across much of the northern Atlantic that’s much shallower than the rest of it and that’s the first place we put a transatlantic cable in a long time ago. Laurent did the work and now has got Ember doing a report, a study on this as well. On a more granular level. Wind, solar and water patterns over hours, days and years are very different. They’re completely discontinuous in North America and Europe. So when Europe is going through a Dunkleflouda, Canada will usually have lots of energy. 

JF: What renewables have done is, well, firstly, the technology is well established and mature, but they’ve exacerbated the need for bigger grids and wider area networks and intercontinental and proper continental scale grids in much like when I started work, every major city had a power station downtown and the oil and the gas and the coal came in ships and pipelines and we kept the lights on. And with that gone, you know, we’re going to need help. We’re going to have to bring the electrons. Like, you know, electrons travel well and they need to travel far. They’re pretty much national. They don’t have their passports yet. Yeah, yeah. 

MB: Well, there’s good news there. One of the things I did this year was a seminar series with India’s electrical utility professionals under the auspices of the India Smart Group Foundation. I describe myself as a broad spectrum nerd these days because I know quite a lot about a lot of different things and I have a synthesis of the overall solution set, you know, and so that helps me express some things. But when I talked to them, I said from an energy security perspective, you can generate enormous amounts of your energy on your continent, the subcontinent, and in an electrified energy system, you only need 40% as compared to a non electrified system. So you don’t need as much as you think. 

And then interconnectors east, west and north, which they’re building, and they have in plan even over to Africa. They’ve got a plan to take one over to Africa and into the ASEAN grid and then connect into the Chinese super grid, enabling regional distribution of electricity. And you know, it’s interesting, I will ask one question because I get a lot of this, well, energy security. How would you trust that country to provide you electricity? I know my reaction to that. What do you think about that kind of weird perspective? 

JF: I think the war in the Ukraine has disabused many people of the trust they placed in Russian gas and the dependency that they had on us, principally the Germans, but others as well. I think if you’re building interconnectors, I think it’s a different proposition. There’s much more equality about sharing renewable energy than there is about buying oil and gas from a government whose values and policies are alien to the consumers. So I’m a big believer in grids. I think the efficiencies are incredible. 

Oil and gas is easy. We’ve been doing it for 100 years, we’ve perfected it’s convenient, it’s lots of things. So it’s going to take a big push and significant development of grids to allow us to wean ourselves off oil and gas and coal. 

MB: Lots of renewables, lots of storage, lots of transmission. Just the nature of the beast. Way cheaper to the study’s point. Mark Z. Jacobson has done similar studies and he finds it a lot cheaper in the future. 

JF: In 2022, the fuel bill for Europe jumped from about 2 or 300 million to 6 or 700 billion euros. That’s a lot of free cash flows that would be available for indigenous infrastructure. That would be a sound investment for a pension fund. For your pension fund. For my pension fund. And creating lots of jobs and lots of opportunities for lots of people. So I think it’s an incredible opportunity we have. 

MB: It is the way of the future. It’s just a question of when they’re doing it. Certainly part of my discussion today around super grid is, you know, there’s a certain European chauvinism that they’ll get it right and then the rest of the world will follow them. But we’ve talked about China. 

JF: China is incredible. Like from when I was developing the east west interconnector, China was probably at the same place in terms of, you know, European companies were going out there and sharing their technology and there was a bit of learning going on and now they’re, they’ve just gone leaps and bounds ahead. So it’s probably the most sophisticated DC market in the world in terms of the multi terminal HVDC grids. Feeding Beijing with 3 gigawatts of renewables, like you can say, like that is. That’s pretty cool. You can get 3 gigawatts of renewables into Beijing with a multi terminal HVDC system. That’s cool. 

MB: There are the modeling I’ve done says they’ve actually passed Europe in terms of the ratio of electrified energy. I did primary energy, total energy consumption converted to terawatt hours. I did electrical generation of terawatt hours and I’ve done that for India, Europe and China back to 1990 every five years just to kind of get a curve through time. And the only curve that’s steeply upwards is China. And Europe used to be the leader in the world and it’s not anymore. And this year the end of China’s infrastructure is coming. They’re getting rid of all the coal that’s going into steel and cement for all their infrastructure. All that energy is going away. They’ve electrified a lot of the rest of their economy. So their electrification curve is steepening, whereas ours is still kind of not steepening nearly as quickly. 

JF: Yeah, I think it’s risk appetite and it’s more of a command and control economy. Europe has been obsessed by deregulation and competition law and, you know, making sure everybody competes fairly and all the rules that go with that. And that’s all very well, but I’m not sure it serves you if you want to do something strategically significant. If I look at the things that utilities did in the past, pumped storage with major hydroelectric schemes. How do you make that investment stand up in a corporate boardroom when you don’t have guaranteed market share and your customers can all migrate to somebody else? So there are challenges there and I think there’s a need for the policy to kind of take cognizance that competition is important and it’s great. But you know, having gas working well with electricity is great. 

Maybe five years ago, it might be reasonable in five years time, but it’s totally relevant in a decarbonized scenario to have, you know, some kind of coupling between markets. It’s important today, but not so much in the future.