Built to last: Why insurers are helping design resilience into renewable energy and storage facilities

Who would have thought falling rocks from the sky on glass that's going to break? The hell impact it had to survive was the equivalent of dropping a golf ball from where it's tight onto the panel. So if you glass didn't crack, you passed the test. That's not a lot of impact energy relative to what it's going to see in reality. In the spring of 2024, a large hail storm went through Southeast Texas and it devastated a facility that was partially still under construction. A $100 million roughly lost. But another facility down the block was able to defensively stow. And the project lost roughly 500 solar panels. So a very, very positive result. As the energy landscape evolves, organizations are managing new risks and greater complexity. FM is one of the world's leading commercial property insurers, helping clients build resilience through a unique combination of engineering expertise, scientific research and risk insights from renewables to thermal from factories to data centers. FM helps organizations better understand risk before losses occur. Learn more at FM dot com FM protect your purpose. Hello, welcome to the energy gang. A discussion with Joe from Wimpykin Z about the fast changing world of energy. I'm in crux, and on this special episode, we're going to be talking about renewables and resilience. It's an increasingly important issue as renewable energy infrastructure gets built out. And as the risks of hazards such as wildfires and health systems grow. To discuss it, I'm drawn by two leaders in renewables insurance from FM, which is one of the world's largest commercial property insurance companies. Mike Perrin is FM's renewable energy market leave. Hello, Mike. Welcome to the show. Hi, Ed. Good morning. Great to see you. And Cassian Walker is an operations vice president and renewables engineering manager. Also at FM. Hello, Cassia. Hello, Ed. Delighted to be here. Yeah, thank you both for a much indeed for joining us today. Now, before we get to the meat of our discussion, when we have new people on the show, we would like to talk to them a little bit about their careers in energy, how they first got interested in the field and the paths they took to the roles they now hold. So maybe Mike, perhaps to start with you, what's your story? What was the path that took you to energy? Sure. Thanks, Ed. I started out as growing up. My father was a chemical engineer and I followed in his footsteps. Studying chemical engineer at Villanova and looking to work in industry. And at the time, jobs were tough to find when I graduated. So I ended up taking a position working for an insurance company as it was really the only thing that I could find at the time I fell into insurance. But I really was really happy that I did. It's an interesting industry where you learn a lot about how a lot of things work. I've been in insurance most of my career and came to FM two years ago to help lead our renewable energy team. Fantastic. I'm Cassian. What about you? Yeah, I grew up in the town called Hartley, Portland, northeast of England. So on the other side of the pond to my colleague, Mike, and in the family, I guess you could say there's a DNA in engineering, a lot of parents, grandparents, who are chemical, mechanical engineers. And so I found myself at the University of Leeds looking at a chemical engineering degree and spotted fire engineering and I thought myself. So I was going to be fires and explosions in my lifetime. So I pursued that and during the course, I actually got insight to FM in terms of the large skill testing and research they do. And I guess that's very pertinent to why we're here. So 24 years ago, I joined FM and worked on a number of engineering roles and got into power gen about 10 years ago, and specifically renewables in the last three in terms of forks and onshore wind, utility scale solar and energy storage. So then tell us a bit more about FM. What does the company do in general? And what are the services then you specifically provide to the renewable energy industry? Yeah, happy to kick off there. We're at what's called a monoline insurance carrier. Essentially, we do one product, properly insurance, we have to do it very well. So we were founded in 1835 and if you look through our entire history, we've had a very strong focus on engineering, understanding the risks that drive losses and exposures that clients facilities. We're often called a company of engineers doing insurance. And I take that as a complement because it speaks to how we look to understand those risks that our clients operations face, not just in the present, but into the future as well. Mike, anything to add on that? No, it's just that we really value the fact that our clients appreciate that we help them in challenging industries. That's really why we ended up joining and working a renewable energy group why we formed a renewable energy group. It was an area where insurance was problematic and tumultuous for our clients and our clients were growing in the renewable energy space. So we wanted to grow with them. Right. So how long ago was this? When did you first set up that specialized renewable energy unit? Yeah, we've been in tune renewable energy assets for nearly 80 years. And as you can imagine, that's more traditional hydro-waste to energy biomass. The specific unit we set up to focus on onshore wind solar and energy. We started about just under three years ago with a tailored policy, an engineering model to service these assets. And Mike and I are part of the leadership team that was engaged and hired into to set up this unit. Right. And as we were saying presumably, then, the business is growing strongly both because the industry is growing. There's a lot more assets out there, there's just a lot more stuff that needs insuring. And because the risks are constantly evolving and changing. It is. Yes, our opportunities are coming more and more. And what we strive to do is work with clients that want to work with us to build these projects resolutely. There's been a part of the reason we're in this space is because many of the projects are being pushed to get built as quickly as possible so that they could meet the needs of the power demand out there. But resilience hasn't always been considered fully in that development. And we help our clients develop the projects more resolutely so that they last for the lifetime of the project. I think that's a great point, Mike. Because what was very interesting to me is we have our traditional power generation clients. So those who are operating in the space who are going through energy transition, plans and strategies and you see the scale up of the renewable energy assets. Also in our client base, we start to see clients who are perhaps in pulp and paper or chemical industries. And as part of their own sustainability and renewable energy objectives are investing in large utility scale generation. And that's where, as the engineer, I help that client who's not really their core business understand and anticipate the risks that these assets could face. Oh, great point. Yeah, that's also a really interesting point. So, yes, as I was saying in the introduction, the focus on resilience might you just use that word and you're saying that is your crucial focus. Probably helpful, I think, to talk a bit about what you mean by that exactly. We should define the terms of this debate. When you talk about resilience for renewable assets, what do you mean? Well, it's the ability to withstand and cast can talk about this a little more detail. The expected conditions that the site is going to face over a useful lifetime. What we've seen is a lot of projects are built quickly and the technology and the use of the components that go into the project have been changing significantly very quickly. And sometimes when you're doing that, you don't fully contemplate the exposures the sites are going to face over their useful lifetime cast you want to add to that. Yeah, I think when we look at resilience, I think engineering-wise, we can kind of distill it into two areas. There's what we'll call the inherent risks. So if you're building in a piece of land that is exposed to, for example, hurricane or flood or earthquake risks, there's not a lot you can change from the inherent risk. So firstly, it's understanding what are those inherent exposures. And then the second piece of this is really how the technology choices enhance the resilience or potentially create vulnerabilities depending on which paths you go down. So from the engineering standpoint, we look at those two kind of key angles to help our clients both understand those inherent risks and then make those technology choices that leads to a resilient development, a resilient outcome. So fundamentally, it's designed and breasted for those events. It's going to see over its lifetime. I'd just like to add one more point that's a quote from someone named Roger Dennis. I like to use it's, resilience is very expensive, except in retrospect. Because when the losses happened, that money would have been well spent and if ahead of time. All right, they're great light, yeah. And so, I mean, just to explore a bit further than when you're thinking about those kind of physical risks, something that occurs to me about, [BLANK_AUDIO] the industry is changing. As I say, firstly, there's just more stuff out there to ensure. Are you also seeing the types of risk change? I mean, when we think about world fires, when we think about hailstorms, possibly, these are far more than that are affected by climate change. Obviously, there are huge debates about climate impacts and often it's difficult to draw a strict line between a particular weather event and a particular climate change, but even so, over time, it seems pretty clear that pans of precipitation, for instance, are very definitely being affected by climate change and that has an effect then on fire risk and on hailstorm risk. Are those issues that loom large for you? Is that something you're thinking about a lot? Is the way those risks are changing? Absolutely. And our research focus on climate risk and projecting them out into 2030 or 2050 time frames is something we spend a lot of time looking to understand. The science clearly shows that there is an increase in the severity of certain severe convective storms, for example, and certain regions might be seen an increase in frequency, and certain regions might be seen as shift in the geographical movement. But I think what is very interesting, the renewable energy spaces, a lot of these developments are going into areas where essentially there was no human habitat, there was no industry there. So the data is not as comprehensive, simply said if the hail fell and no one observed it, no one measured it, we weren't tracking it, there isn't the depth of research to speak to what the actual events are. So this is where the modeling comes in. We put a lot of focus on understanding what the events are, the frequency of those events, and use that to help our clients understand these project developments from the inherent risk as I alluded to and then how those technology choices help mitigate or alleviate the risks that they're going to face. Yeah, just to add to that, we're really focused here mostly on solar, although there are weather impacts for wind projects and batteries as well. But the solar industry in the US really started in California and projects on the East Coast where there was not much hail exposure. And what the industry did is took the same equipment, the same design, and put it in areas which were subject to that hail. And who would have thought falling rocks from the sky on glass, that's going to break. So that's what's happened, and what the industry has adjusted. And we're helping work with the people in the industry so that we can make those assets more resilient in those areas. So how do you come in then as an insurer? I mean, thinking about it from an asset owner's point of view, I've just built a sort of project, or probably I'm thinking about building one, I think well, I'm going to need to get this insured. How does the relationship work with FM? Yeah, I'm happy to lead with that. And you hit on a key piece there, which is you're thinking about it. The contemplation of the risks really can't come early enough in the development phase. And so what I mean by that is a typical utility scale solar farm. Let's say 300 megawatts. You probably need about three and a half thousand acres of land. So as developers are out there, clients are out there looking at where these power markets are, that they are maybe predisposed to going to, then where the land securement is, you can then start to very quickly bring in what are those inherent natural hazards that that development could face. And really top your list is going to be things like hail, wind, flood, wind storm for those solar utility assets. A lot of the, I'll call it key markets in the US where there's fantastic irradiance. There's a very a minimal grid connection processes to can accelerate that through. Also a quite significantly hail challenge from Texas, maybe in an obvious one, very severe, very frequent hail. Maybe to let us obvious like Arizona that has severe and frequent hail, but it's probably not top of somebody's list from a hail risk standpoint, yet it would be from an ability to generate power from the irradiance values that are in Arizona. The future of energy depends on more than innovation. It depends on resilience. As one of the world's leading commercial property insurers, FM helps organizations understand reduced risk through a unique blend of engineering expertise, scientific research and real world experience. Our engineers work alongside clients to identify vulnerabilities, evaluate emerging risks, and develop practical strategies that help prevent losses before they occur. From renewable energy and thermal power generation to manufacturing and critical infrastructure, FM helps organizations make informed decisions that strengthen resilience and improve long-term performance. For nearly 200 years, FM has been helping clients navigate uncertainty through a science-based approach to risk management. Learn more at FM.com. FM protect your partners. Yes, so that raises a really interesting point again about the way that risk in the energy industry is evolving as renewables infrastructure gets built out. You mentioned that land footprint of 300,000 acres for a fairly average size solar project. Just the greater land footprint of renewables does presumably lead to some very different risk calculations compared to what you might be thinking about if you had a gas-fired pipeline or a coal-fired plant. Is that right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's an interesting point because on one side with a thermal plant, you could argue there's concentration of risk in terms of the combustion steam turbine units. But when you look at the large footprint, you have got, particularly from the natural hazard standpoint, these events are normally large, wide, geographically aggregate events. When you've got a particularly large facility that can be exposed to several different things, the number one question that we normally get from our clients is what is the hell risk associated with this? Really, that speaks to some of the design progress Michael alluded to, but some significant industry events that have kind of raised awareness of both the frequency and severity of hell and the limitations of the technology. And that's where we've seen, I think, very significant advances in how trackers, which are primarily designed to optimize the output of the solar array, but serve a fundamental piece of the resilience equation in mitigating hell and wind storm effects in particular on these large footprint developments. And then you've got the solar panel itself in terms of understanding the energy it can absorb, IE the hill impact, before then it fails. Fails, grass, clack, cracked, punched through the panels, the damage that you've seen, maybe in the media of some of these these events. And it really is a system. So what we work hard to do is understand how that system performs in the environment it is so that the clients can make the best choices around the component to that system. What tracker, what store angle does it need front or backloading wind design? What panel impact energy resilience? Do I need a hill optimised panel? Do I need an average performing fan panel? Or is it in a part of the US where there's minimal hell risks so that I can design my tracker for an impending event, even though the panel itself may be more susceptible to damage if I didn't have it stored in a particular angle. So you can see it can become very complex in terms of the variables you need to work through, but we bring the simplicity to help the client navigate through those choices. Let me just add with an example to what Cass was talking about in the spring of 2024, a large hail storm went through Southeast Texas, and it devastated a facility that was partially still under construction, $100 million roughly lost. So a very very positive result. And actually that project had less resilient panels than the one that had the $100 million loss because they were able to effectively and defensively stow. So it's these are the type of things that we're trying to work with coach and coach clients to ensure that they take the precautions in advance of impending storm so that they protect their assets. Right, that's really interesting. And we talked about stowing. So what that's essentially sort of the tracker system enables you what to tilt the panels to the vertical or closer to the vertical. So the impact is not directly on them. Exactly. You're looking to what direction is the storm advancing. And this is where you get into the predictive climate and the weather information in the US. So the US pretty much gets scanned every five minutes from a Doppler radar standpoint. So if you've got a storm that's kind of tracking towards your facility, the operators have a really early heads up in terms of the direction vectors that it's coming. That allows them to make some strategic decisions around storing the system. And if it's a convective storm, aware from the oncoming storm. So that means the panels are facing aware from the oncoming storm at a sto angle that could be anything from 60 up to 78 degrees is kind of the range of the track has depending on your manufacturer. And the objective there is when the hill falls, it delivers more of a glancing blow. So less impact energy is directly transferred to the panel, thus minimizing or completely mitigating damage to that panel. And when you've got 700,000 panels sat out there in an array and they're all tilting away from the storm, that's the level of resilience. It's not quite as simple in terms of the industry as evolved. So some of these existing systems, they may not be able to store away from the storm and survive maybe the expected wind speeds. So this is where the industry has come from to where it is today, where the most modern design is there. They can handle a front and backloading wind, as we say, so the wind loads associated with that. So you truly are focused on what best direction an angle to store from the hill resilience standpoint. Yeah, one point to add on that, the cast touched on this. You're dealing not just with potential hail, but also wind. And you can choose to store for wind at a lower angle than or for hail. And in some of these bigger events, that's what we think happened. And that's not the approach that's been effective and some of the systems can't handle the wind and the hail at the same time. The other thing that's really important is making sure that these systems are tested. Everybody knows they should store the projects in advance of the hail storm, but sometimes it just hasn't worked. So it's like having a sprinkler system that's not connected to water. We work with our clients to make sure that they test their systems thoroughly so that when the hail storm is coming, every panel stows in the way it's supposed to. It's a great point, Mike. 'Cause in working with the large tracker manufacturers in the industry, they've advanced some of their capabilities in terms of alcohol and successful storm metrics. So speaking exactly to what Mike was saying, these are sensors, these are reports, these are confirmations that the laws of stored is designed. And simply put, if you did a store test, you need to validate that 300 laws actually stored or if one or two didn't, how do you become aware of that? And there's been different approaches out there, whether it's using drones to validate the aerial imagery to validate humans to validate in terms of observations. And as I alluded to, the tracker manufacturers building that into their current design so you get that confidence of the store. - So that is really interesting. It's very impressive what is possible now in terms of what the trackers can do. Presumably, all of that is more expensive though. And if you're buying these modern more advanced trackers, it's gonna be significant increasing cost compared to even earlier generations of trackers or to a simple Brax system. So to your point, Castile, you were saying about, it's a complicated calculation. Presumably working out when it's worth spending them on that more expensive tracking system and where it isn't. That's gonna be difficult to work out, isn't it? - It is complicated, but the way we approach FMAs, we lean into our research to help guide our advice to our clients. So from a panel standpoint, we've done a lot of testing of these panels to heal resilience. And simply I'll just categorize it as the families of panels. You see buy facial, which is typically very thin, glass on the front and back. You see thin film panels, you see monofacial panels, and then you start to see heal optimized panels. And we've tested throughout. And when you take those test insights and then you look at the inherent natural hazard risks or the heal risk for that location. And then you look at the tracker options. Maybe 60 degree with a heal optimized panel is perfectly fine for that site. Maybe a buy facial panel needs a highest store angle for the level of resilience the clients looking for. I think that's a really important point because out there you will see several different alcohol and models, there's the develop and flip the model, which is they'll develop and sell into more of the space of our clients where they're developing to build on and operate through the life cycle. So for that type of profile and that client of ours, the resilience of the system over its lifetime is extremely important. So when you take the testing insights and you look at what the damaging events could be, this is where the research models the impacts. And it dials it into a monetary number. So what's the physical damage on a given return frequency and what's that business interruption ID? You've lost the ability to export power through damage panels. What does that mean from a business interruption standpoint? And so the clients can see what those levels of exposure is from a monetary standpoint. And that helps the ROI discussion around this development needs that level of resilience. And here's the numbers of back it up. Yeah, the economics part is so important. These projects often have very thin margins so they can't do everything. We feel it's our job and clients' value that we help them determine what's the best way to build their project economically. And the insurance costs on these projects are significant. They're sometimes 30% or more of their operating expenses. Over time, if we build projects more resiliently, those insurance costs should drop as we see less and less losses. I think analogy to maybe help crystallize some of the differences in performances. We mentioned the bifacial panel. The standard IC612 on five tests, and I'll get a little technical. The hill impact it had to survive was the equivalent of dropping a golf ball from where's tight onto the panel. So if your glass didn't crack, you passed the test. That's not a lot of impact energy. Relative to what it's going to see in reality. So I'll bring you into Texas, where we've seen events throughout the solar industry there. And a two-inch hail ball has about 16 times more impact energy than that analogy I just gave. And the frequency of a two-inch hail event in large parts of Texas is a one-in-three-year event. So that means in any given year, there's a 33% chance of it happening. That is not a good panel choice for Texas, even in the trackers. Because once you introduce the trackers, you then introduce the complexity of the stirring in the right direction, the reliability of the communications, the mechanical equipment functioning. So that's where we'll look at the information and the science and really have an in-depth discussion with the client on panel choice, on trackered choice. So they can see what that translates into from a cost standpoint, as Mike alluded to, on the insurance and the terms and conditions associated with that. And it really helps them make that informed decision through understanding what the risks are on a good day when everything works. And what that level of risk is on a bad day when something fails, we store in the wrong direction. Those types of catastrophic events. Right, so to Mike's point, then about how insurance can be 30% of the total cost of a project, making those kind of decisions. And essentially, then you would go to people and say, well, if you have those as you like, by facial panels, then the insurance will cost this much a year. Then if you have this kind of tracker or this kind of panel, it'll be that much lower a year. That's something, as you say, which really kind of can clarify the technology choices that people are going to be making. Yeah, it does, but insurance is reactive, and it's not quite that simple. We, it takes the insurance is relatively simple. It's how much do we pay out in claims versus how much we collect in premium. And when a large loss happened, the cost to that insurance, it goes up for many clients. One of my clients used to say a hair loss is bad for all of us, so why can't we prevent all of them? Because then if we are able to show that the project's going to be resilient, then the cost for their insurance will go down. I'd like to pick up that point on resilience you just made, Mike, because a lot of these developments are heavily debt financed. And one of the things very early on is the financiers, the banks, the Lenders' Consulants. They're all asking the questions around resilience. How resilience is development? What choices, what approaches have you taken? And what we find with our clients is being partnered very early on in that process to work through some of those scenarios. That allows them to show to their Lenders' Lenders' Consulants tangibly the actions they are planning to take and how that alters favorably the level of resilience. And it really helps them secure the best terms and conditions from the finance in standpoint because it's rooted in the science of the risk and how those technology choices have helped mitigate it. And so in my experience I've worked with clients on a lot of projects across industries but this is probably one of the most unique where we've got drawn into a lot of those upfront discussions to support the clients to help them navigate that and it's really made a big impact on the outcome. Yeah let me add to that it's really an important point. We sometimes the industry overall doesn't get that opportunity to just help the client decide how to choose the or which equipment they're going to use, which trackers they're going to have, which panels they're going to use. They're basically the projects already been baked and then they look for insurance. That's what we're trying to change. We're trying to sit with our clients in their planning stages and it's not just us it's the independent engineers it's the banks it they're just we haven't been part of the process and that has to change so that the projects are going to be resilient for the lifetime of the project. Why do you think that is then because I mean when you put it like that it seems sort of obvious that these kind of issues should be considered at an early stage and I was sort of joking about the prospect of somebody developing a whole project and then saying oh right now we need to ensure it but I mean for what you'll say it's not quite that but it's sort of you know that is a tendency in the industry as you say to get these projects kind of pretty well baked before the insurance aspect is considered. As I say why do you think that is and what does it take to change people's minds? I can give you that pretty pretty I don't want to say succinctly but there's a few things that are going on for a while insurance for renewable assets were really easy and really cheap too because we didn't have hail events in California and New Jersey where the projects were and then things changed and then insurance got more difficult and there's also a big push to the idea of speed to power especially with data centers and digital infrastructure coming on then insurance was originally thought of almost like as a throw-in and one client for example their cost of insurance went over 10 years from four cents to 36 cents per hundred dollars of insured value nine times that's hard to finance that difference so it's it's a really has to be a sea change from how clients think about this the other part of it is clients negotiate and procure the panels they're going to use for not just one project but for all their projects and they do it in advance then we come in and they tell us they're going to use these very thin panels in areas that have hail exposure and we have to be the one saying this is going to be a problem. Yeah I think from the engineer in risk perspective a lot of the I'll call it vulnerabilities that these sites are trying to design around is what the insurance industry called secondary perils and these are things that we've talked about in terms of hail events wildfire events freeze events that the perils that aren't well modeled the less evolved in the models and so really the playing catch up from understanding the hail risk for example that that number one question we get from our clients what's the hail risk out there and when the models do exist they sometimes have to pick a best fit so it's common to see even recent models treat solar farms as steel sheet on steel frame and clearly that's not the representation of glass on tracker and so for hail ball hit steel sheet on steel frame it's going to do a lot of different impact outcome then what it would on glass and smash it so some of the data is being very limited in that awareness around the development. Yeah what Cass is talking about is how insurers use modeling of whether aspects on projects to evaluate what they think is going to be their worst possible loss the bad day and the models have been poor they're getting better but as a result the insurers right now don't trust the models because they've been bad the event I talked about that had a hundred million dollar loss the model that was done said the worst event that could happen was twenty million dollars and so that's been way off why would insurers trust that model. Yeah that's fascinating and to that general point about the renewable energy industry solar in particular is still reasonably new it has been growing very fast it's been growing fast in a lot of new locations where it hasn't really existed in the past and so inevitably it's a massive learning exercise for everybody involved for the insurers as I say the banks developers the customers everyone is kind of finding out in real time what the risks are what the potential impacts might be. Absolutely and I think as we've been talking hopefully the listeners have that sense that we're very focused FM on understanding the research the science behind this to help us air differentiate risks to then provide best in class advice the clients my kid on that that's a little unusual in the industry insurance industry who take more of an actuarial based approach so here at FM just coming back to kind of what makes us a little bit different in that regard is when you take those site specific insights and understand the technology choices that the clients contemplate and it really helps them understand that landscape of risk to then determine how they want to move forward and that's where I think the industry itself sharing these knowledge and insights is trying to elevate through standards sharing of research perspectives in terms of panel performance or tracker engagement so to support that broader need of of the energy transition and speed to market it's introduced speed of research to those discussions in our organization. Yeah and it's if you go back five years ago there really wasn't any of these conversations about about the engineering about the technical part of it the cast is touching on 2022 there were three large hail events in Texas that woke up the insurance industry some insurance companies just got out of doing solar projects at all like they've got out of California for wildfire exposures and some other insurers got out of hurricane risk in Florida but it's the engineering aspect of it is something that was needed and frankly welcome by the rest of the insurance community it's something we at FM do uniquely relative to the arpears. So where do you think the industry is going to be and where is FM going to be let's say five years for now is this a five years ago people weren't really talking about these kind of risks there was much less of a sophisticated understanding than you've gotten now as you were saying Cassian speed of research speed to understanding is very important to keep pace with the growth and the development of the industry how much more sophisticated you do you think you're going to be in the future. Yeah I think I look at the evolution and I'll draw comparison with the thermal side the thermal side that's been around much longer has things like M+1 or M+2 approaches baked into their inherent design and what I mean by that is if you need one transformer they have two or three because if one goes down it's not going to be a critical path bottleneck. Mike mentioned that the solar developments for example are built on very thin margins we're not there yet from a maturity standpoint and then we're not saying that each solar farm needs M+1 transformers. No but as you build out your pipeline of projects this creates opportunities to how do you plan what we would call contingency plan or sparing of key equipment because maybe you procure a transformer that can be deployed in 10, 15, 20 different solar farms because you've standardized your approaches so to me that leads more into that where we're going to mature so that this critical powergen infrastructure which it is is not subject to a bottleneck or single point of failure and that resides more in the what we call the balance plan transformers switch gear bus ducting those kinds of key piece of equipment that allow the solar power generated to be exported to the grid. I think my thought on where we're going to be in five years we already see what's happening and it's really exciting from where I sit that we're now evaluating some the things that we never were these tracker companies they sit down and talk with our research people they talk with other insurers too that didn't happen five years ago we're trying to work and collaborate together with the OEMs with the service provider so that we all help make the industry better it's going to be make the make these projects more economic over the lifetime of the project. I think that's an interesting point as well Mike because at least in the short term we've seen a lot of movement to collocating so for example battery energy storage systems collocated at existing solar or wind farms because you're tapping into that grid connection that exists the capacity that may be there and in doing so there's you know opportunity to design in additional resilience as you're co-locating a storage asset, which as we've seen in several prominent events, a grid that is drawing on solar generation needs that inertia balance and batteries provide that. Their one means of providing that for whether it's grid stability or some of the peak shaving model. So I think that is really interesting because when you co-locate provides you opportunities to think a little bit more helistically about the generation and storage at that site from a whole, you know, another level of resilience. Yeah, we didn't touch on this, but the battery storage space, there's a condition called thermal runaway that happens occasionally, and that can be a bad day. There was one one of the biggest events that insurers have paid involved most landing that had a fire. They had batteries in buildings and using older NMC lithium-ion batteries, but the entire building was lost. The technology is getting better faster so that the likelihood of these thermal runaway events happening is less the NM, the LFP technology is a little less energy dense and it doesn't have the thermal, as strong a thermal runaway exposure, sodium ion is coming as well similarly as less of an exposure, and the spacing between batteries helps limit the thermal runaway to a single unit. Good job on the engine inside there, Mike. One thing I'd just add to maybe put a bit of context to that is the first large-scale fire test on containerized lithium batteries was undertaken just over three years ago. So to kind of give you an equivalent analogy, we've spoke a lot about Hale at solar and how the the learnings of risk has advanced very quickly. It's very similar on the battery energy side. How much spacing between containers was not fully understood as an industry? Till about three years ago when the first large-scale fire test was done, here at FM we'd already been testing lithium ion batteries. They appear in many of our clients operations, whether it's data centers or containerized battery energy storage units, and again sharing those test procedures and validating, you know, some of the space separation guides, or really well positioned to advise clients and industry there through our own data sheets that anybody can access at FM.com. I know it's quite a shameless plug, but I share that because we do like to publish our technical standards for the benefit of the industry. Yeah, that does sound really interesting, certainly if something I'll take a look myself. So it is absolutely fascinating, I think, as I said at the beginning of this podcast, as I always said at the beginning of every energy gang, we're talking about the fast changing world of energy. Just talking to you now, it has really brought it to me, I think, just how fast the industry is changing just what happens as renewables and storage scale up, industry matures, the technology moves forward, everything that goes with that and the way that our understanding grows and capabilities improve and services improve and cost to come down. It's certainly a very exciting prospect, it's been great talking to you about it. Unfortunately, we are going to have to leave it there for now, but it's been fantastic. Thank you very much indeed, Mike, for joining us. Thanks, Ed. I loved it. Thanks very much, Cassian. Thanks, Ed. It's been a pleasure. Yeah, really has been great talking to you both. Many thanks to our producer, as ever, Molly Merwin, and above all, many thanks to all of you for listening or watching whatever you're doing. Please leave us a comment, leave a review, get in touch on social media, we really value your feedback, do keep that coming, and we'll be back very soon with all the latest news and views on the future of energy. Until then, goodbye.