Speaker 1Today, we're excited to welcome Laura Hoffman-Ostenhoff, Central Europe Lead at Gridcog. With a background in energy consulting, Laura plays a crucial role in supporting Gridcog's clients across the UK and Europe, helping them make data-driven decisions to accelerate their path to decarbonisation. Laura, we're glad to have you with us. Welcome to Next Time Around.
Speaker 2Thank you. Thanks for having me. Welcome to Next Time Around, brought to you by Powerverse, the podcast where we take on the big questions of the green transition and explore how the world is changing for a cleaner, brighter future. We're your hosts, Lauren Forster and Richard Britton, and we'll be diving into the tech, the policies and the big ideas that are reshaping industries and people's lives. Whether it's cutting-edge technology or shifting priorities, we're here to figure out what it all means for you and the world that we're building for tomorrow. So get ready as we take a fresh look at how changes today are laying the groundwork for a better next time around. Thanks very much for joining us today, Laura. It's really interesting looking at your background. Would you be able to tell us a bit more about how you've got to where you are today?
Speaker 3Yeah, sure. So I am originally from Vienna, born and raised there, went to school there. And then at some point, I was really interested in physics, knew I wanted to study physics. But also, I was interested in the world of physics, and I was really interested in the world of physics. And I also knew I didn't want to kind of stay in physics forever. And the schooling system in Austria is very, say, formative. So if you study physics, you'll become a physicist or a physics professor. It's probably not quite as tight as that, but a little bit more in that direction. And I was somehow aware that in the UK, it's a bit more fluid. You can kind of study one thing and then go into and still find your path in a different industry. So I moved to the UK after school to study physics at Warwick. Did that for three years. It was interesting, but as I kind of moved on, I was like, oh, I'm going to study physics. And I was it wasn't my eternal calling. And I've always been somewhat of a, let's say, idealist. In school, I was kind of that annoying kid that was fighting with everybody else about refugee rights and all that kind of thing. So I knew I wanted to do something that could combine my science background with something good for the world, I suppose. So yeah, sustainability, renewable energy, that was kind of a sensible path to bring those two together. Yeah. And then I did my master's in energy systems at the University of Oxford, so I stayed in the UK for that, which was a really brilliant course, gave me a great kind of overview in terms of what's going on in the energy world, what really are the parts of the energy world, what kind of subsegments could you actually go work in? Yeah. And then I went into energy consulting after that. Well, yeah, after the course, I had a nice overview in terms of what's kind of out there, but not really what kinds of companies exist and what actually exists. And so I did my master's in energy systems at the University of Oxford, would be an interesting thing to work in or direction to work in. Yeah, which is why I went into consulting because in a way I saw it as an extension of studying because ultimately, yeah, you continue learning. And when you're in consulting, you get handed from project to project. It's quite stressful, but you learn so many different things so quickly. Yeah. So I did that. For that, I actually moved back to, well, I moved to Berlin. So back into the EU, I suppose. And now I'm back in London at GridCon. I've been at GridCon now for around a year and a half. Yeah. And obviously, GridCon is a super exciting place to work.
Speaker 2Fantastic. We'd love to hear more about your time at GridCon. It sounds like you've had an incredible journey to get there and being able to apply what you've done at university. I think that's quite rare. Although both of us are actually doing that too, because we both do geography here. So we've fallen into it too. Sets you up for
Speaker 1everything and nothing.
Speaker 2Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it would be great. It's great to hear how you're applying what you've learned in consulting and obviously in your degree and what you're doing at GridCon now.
Speaker 3Yeah, it's really cool because obviously GridCon is still super broad, but much closer to what's actually happening. So we still work with so many different types of customers. I think we'll probably get into this a little bit more detail later. Yeah, we sit a little bit closer to the customer wanting to decarbonize or wanting to invest in some projects and then actually doing that, which feels like the logical progression in terms of coming closer to the actual projects after consulting, which was a bit further removed from that. Yeah. And then obviously the types of customers are very similar to be fair. So it really just feels like the next step along the value chain for them
Speaker 1as well. Perhaps for our listeners, you could tell us a bit about how GridCon got started and what it does.
Speaker 3What we actually do. Yeah. No, for sure. So GridCon, the startup was founded out of who actually had an energy startup before GridCon as well. Yeah. And then found it out of lockdown out of home office in Perth in Australia in 2020. And originally they focused more on behind the meter customers. So kind of corporations that want to energy users, things like that, that want to reduce their carbon footprint by investing in energy assets. Got a bit of a pull from front of me to customers as well, back in Australia, large utility, scale, solar or battery developers. So that's kind of how the product grew just a little bit by demand. And so
Speaker 1for those that are not as familiar with the language in this space, the behind the meter projects were things like helping companies reduce emissions by the stuff they're doing within their companies. Is that right?
Speaker 3It would be, I suppose, behind the meter. I always try to understand as there's some assets that you invest in. So say a solar panel, battery, wind, if you like, that sits behind the same meter as the rest of the factory or the rest of the energy consumption. So for example, a supermarket that would like to put solar panels on the roof, that would be a classic behind the meter example, or a manufacturing site that would like to put EV chargers on their site as well, or electrify their fleet, things like that. So it's kind of when it comes along with existing energy consumption and they all share one grid connection, that's what we call behind the meter. I think there's actually quite a lot of quite a few definitions of behind the meter and front of meter out there, but that's what we call, that's the one that we landed on.
Speaker 1So these are the projects that companies are doing to help cut down their energy costs and increase their carbon efficiency within their operation. But then the business moved into the kind of the grid scale stuff you're saying.
Speaker 3Exactly. Because it's kind of a natural extension because the way I think to think about it is for behind the meter assets, so say solar or especially batteries or any other sort of flexibility, and I'm already going quite deep here, but for them to actually make sense behind the meter, the commercial connection to the grid, so let's say the pricing that they buy the energy on has to be somewhat volatile. It has to be maybe just a time of use contract or something like that so that at some times it's cheaper and at some times it's more expensive to buy this electricity or sell. That's when solar panels, but especially if flexibility like battery make most sense for behind the meter customers. And then as soon as we have that volatility of market pricing, wholesale markets, pass-through contracts, day ahead wholesale markets in the software, we can easily, or not easily, but it's quite natural to then go, okay, if we already have all these markets now in the software, we can also serve front of meter customers, which live way more off of these markets, their entire financial model, basically business case for large scale solar plants, large scale solar plants. Battery plants or co-located ones are based on that market interaction or trading on markets, but that's kind of the relation of how you can grow from one into the other.
Speaker 1Really interesting. I imagine the numbers are quite finely balanced in this because I remember reading a Bill Gates article once about the cost per kilowatt hour as you store it in a home battery or in a site battery that you've had to invest in versus if you're just consuming it straight off the grid. So these must be long-term projects and they must be ones that are kind of finely tuned with debt and financing as well. Is that about right?
Speaker 3Exactly. Yeah. In GridCook, our customers come to model their projects and get a kind of answer in terms of what it might look like financially over that lifetime out. The whole financing and debt story is kind of beyond the scope of GridCook per se, but obviously we do often see our customers then go to banks or equity financiers with our results to be able to finance those projects.
Speaker 2I think you've touched on it slightly already, but it'd be great to go into it in a little bit more detail. It's to describe really what GridCook does and how it helps solve the problems that your customers are kind of looking for.
Speaker 3Yeah, definitely. So GridCook ultimately is a software solution for our customers, a software as a service startup. And what our customers can do is basically create a simulation version of their real project. Usually they start actually with a baseline. So they model on a scenario level basis. They start with a baseline, which actually reflects entirely their current site. And then they change things like, okay, actually currently I have just an energy consumption profile that's on a flat tariff. What if I add solar? What if I add a battery? What if I add EV chargers? Our customers kind of build their scenarios like that on a physical level, but also on a commercial level. So what if I changed my flat tariff to a wholesale pass-through contract or engaged in market trading in any other way and obviously that is kind of the setup what our customers can also feed in are the physical constraints of the site so what is actually the grid connection limit that you have on your site or what are the actual specs of your solar and battery assets etc and then once you have kind of configured all of that in grid cog you press a big green button that says run simulation and the software will basically turn all of that into a big multi-integer linear programming equation optimization so the sim engine will actually access so what sits behind i guess that interface will access some aws service and solve this big equation in an optimal way basically spit out actual asset dispatch profiles so what will your battery do in that scenario at each point in time so really on an interval level not only your battery of course your energy consumption grid import grid export solar acid you know all your assets what are they actually doing at each point in time during the entire lifetime of your model and what does that mean commercially so what is your cash flow over the duration and how does that cash flow actually get generated yeah just i'm not i'm not sure if i was 100 clear on that optimization part the way that works is the optimization really goes to maximize some value streams some commercial value streams and minimize some commercial value streams that's kind of the the brain behind grid cog amazing is that clear
Speaker 1so absolutely clear absolutely clear so that your your customers have got an idea at least about which of the variants in the system they want to maximize whether it's like carbon emission reduction or cost reduction or something else and then they put the rest of the parameters
Speaker 3in am i yeah so just to be clear it's all a commercial optimization so we can't currently minimize for co2 emissions for example as a result of the optimization but what we can do is we can say put a co2 price on emissions and then minimize for that price yeah so in extension you could do that but yeah ultimately you're trying to have somebody make money off something and save money off something else but yes they come in with an idea of a
Speaker 1project plan there's a lot of stuff in the press at the moment there's changes coming in in terms of esg rules to drive tighter reporting you know holding companies to account on that carbon component imagine your software it's quite applicable to
Speaker 3that yeah so it's not something we focus on at the moment but we do have outputs that yeah take you through your emissions we have multiple different emission models actually that you can use there's some flat emissions that you could just input kind of this is our grid emissions but then also what we can do is we can kind of interval level emissions to markets so say you're modeling a project in 2024 and you want to know exactly how much emissions the grid had at say 3 p.m on the 28th of october 2024 as you do exactly
Speaker 1and we are able to
Speaker 3kind of put that information in and match that exactly to actually calculate a very granular emissions profile of your site which i as far as i'm aware goes beyond the grid emissions profile of your site which i as far as i'm aware goes beyond the the esg requirements at the moment or the normal kind of carbon accounting but our customers can kind of choose how much granularity they want
Speaker 1in that sounds very useful
Speaker 2yeah definitely you're actually way ahead of where it is now you've discussed that customers behind the meter in front of the meter are projects that you've worked on before could you like tell us who your ideal customer is yeah so
Speaker 3there's multiple different customer types and customer segments that grid appeals to just by virtue of being so customizable and kind of customers being able to model very different types of projects in grid cog i would say the majority of customers are large-scale project developers behind the meter project developers sometimes also energy users so big supermarket chains factories companies like that though those do have to have some sort of internal energy team in order to be able to use the software because the energy is complex um let's try to make it as simple as possible but we won't ever um To be able to reflect all the complexities without having some level of complexity in the ui as well so we do have some energy users in there as well if they have energy teams internally if not we often have consultancies kind of working for them as a middleman using grid cog for their projects as well and then of course also electric vehicle fleets so shell for example is a big customer they're looking to electrify lots of their forecourts and that gets really difficult with grid connections and often it makes sense to add a battery to the grid and then you can add a battery to those kind of very remote four-quart ev charging stations and then often adding a battery there makes sense to kind of increase the power capacity of the grid on that site and then the last segment is also technology providers so companies that might manufacture their own new batteries or sometimes even optimizers that kind of come to us and use grid cog as a proposal tool almost to kind of show their potential customers that they're going to be using grid cog as a way of saying look if you buy our battery this is how you can benefit from it
Speaker 1exactly yeah it's like a value calculator on steroids for them really isn't it that's your tagline right there
Speaker 2i had a follow-up question
Speaker 1we were talking about it on the way over here and we'd imagine that maybe some of your customers would be some big infrastructure and utility companies that are going through a shift and a transformation what about the ones that are sort of starting from scratch i'm thinking about the companies that are financing and building the wind farms and the solar parks and so on where that that's their game do you work with them at
Speaker 3all yeah so we usually would probably put them into front of me to developers as a category asset owners as well yeah so for example golden peaks capital are a big german polish company that work with huge solar and battery plants in germany and poland and they use grid cog to kind of calculate how much money they might make off these huge farms and kind of to justify that and then they use grid cog to kind of calculate how much money they might their investments as well
Speaker 1really interesting thank you so you've
Speaker 2obviously mentioned that you um work with some big players and have like quite a big portfolio of companies internationally what are some common themes that you see companies kind of getting right and wrong when they come to you for advice yeah i
Speaker 3think what we actually see quite a lot is companies underestimating the level of complexity that is required for these renewable energy projects especially when it comes to things like value stacking via different market trading opportunities things like that there's you know so many of our customers tried to build grid cog in-house before they came to us and failed and ended up making some very you know rough assumptions such as if you trade again this is quite deep but for example there's multiple different wholesale markets in most western countries i suppose so you're able to either just buy and sell in one way or the other or kind of buy and sell in all of them and even buy and sell in between those and often if companies try to create their own in-house model they would just say okay if i'm trading in all three of them i'm just going to add 10 of revenue to what i had before because that's kind of a nice easy blanket assumption which is obviously incredibly wrong and can go well can be incredibly wrong depending on the year depending on the moment depending on the prices at each point in time similarly in ancillary services there's so many assumptions like if your battery bids into those frequency ancillary services it won't get accepted every time it won't then get activated every time you kind of get money for all those steps we've actually did a test on this and so for example if you assume that your battery will get accepted every time it bids into ancillary frequency services and also that it can bid into these services kind of in half an hour increments it has to be in four hour blocks you can get the revenue off ancillary services wrong by 2.5x which is insane so this is based as far as i remember on 2024 prices yeah but that's kind of the scale that i'm talking about so quite a lot of times companies come in and go yeah i've tried this somehow gotten the revenues completely wrong can we like scrap all that i've tried and do it again properly with grid cog so yeah i think probably underestimating complexity yeah energy projects would be my answer here
Speaker 1and is there a dimension to that as well around this is a very physical industry the sites and this construction you mentioned substations and connecting up to the grid presumably there's important timelines and stuff that need to get hit in these projects to make them all work is that always well thought through i've read a lot about getting the modern grid connected up as being kind of a challenge in this area yeah
Speaker 3for sure there are always people that complain about tso's and tso's that complain about projects i think it's a endless cycle of of complaining so just for
Speaker 1what was that acronym tso
Speaker 3sorry um transmission system operator so the ones operating the high voltage lines yeah i think it's a eternal cycle of complaining about one another some may say it would probably work a little bit better if they all work together a little bit more but yes i mean for us usually that's a step after grid cog so we're very much in the pre-feasibility stage but certainly yes there's there's some complexities that our customers experience a nice example maybe is in germany for example example right now there's 500 gigawatts of battery storage waiting for a grid connection which is insane yeah and there's a quite a not so smart process and a way in which it works in germany right now so kind of it's not super clear who will get picked first and it's not like be ready first then then you'll get the connection first it's kind of just like where are you in the queue but independently of that some batteries might get a or some of these acids might get a spotty grid connection or a dynamic grid connection that say actually you can't export into the grid at noon because we already have god knows how many solar panels exporting the grid at
Speaker 1that time and your business started in australia didn't it yes they're renowned there aren't they for that problem
Speaker 3exactly um so what customers actually really like to do in grid cog is for example bring in these assumptions as well so say if i you know have a battery on this grid connection point with these limitations how much would that actually impact my investment case and usually it's not as much as they think because usually during those grid congestion times the prices are bad anyway so you wouldn't want to export into the grid anyway so if you optimize your battery properly that wouldn't really be a problem anyway so a lot of that i think is yeah in a way about education as well communication yeah
Speaker 2really interesting just the complexities that you've listed there that i'd love to hear about the other complexities that you kind of encounter especially as you move across the different markets with regulations impacting kind of your simulations and assumptions could you tell us more about that yeah
Speaker 3for sure so of course there's countries like australia but also germany that have this plethora of sun of solar energy being fed into the grid and the need for flexibility coming out of that but then on the other hand you have the uk which was much earlier in terms of battery deployment utility scale battery deployment but not really due to there being so much renewable energy and intermittent kind of generation but just due to the fact that it's an islanded or almost islanded grid and that there's many challenges coming with that as well so there's yeah multiple different challenges across the world and across many different energy systems which often can be represented in similar ways and can be solved in kind of parallel ways i would say
Speaker 1when you explain it there are so many layers to it it's uh it's like an onion isn't it just keep peeling them away so it'd be really interesting to hear about how you go about attracting your customers and the sort of the sales process on that because i can imagine there's lots and lots of knowledge behind your platform i'm just interested in the way that in the way that it's presented in the market that's a
Speaker 3really interesting question yeah so we certainly have our business development team they're always looking for new companies to work with or who grid cog but then we also have the team that i work in which is the industry team and we're kind of the grid cog experts if you like so the the expert users it's a big part of our role is to help existing customers to navigate the software properly represent their projects in the software understand the results but also we're always kind of on the pulse of the industry of what's happening um so that we make and make sure through that that the software always lets you represent what's happening um and what customers actually want yeah and with that of course we play a big role in the kind of sales process as well so as soon as you so you know the actual process is kind of there will be an interested company then we take them through a 75 minute demo session which will be with one of us and one of the business development team and really kind of take them through an existing or through a demo project that really speaks to their use case so for example a developer in germany would not be very interested in a supermarket project in the uk so we do have you know lots of different um pre-built demo projects and sometimes we build new ones for interested companies to really take them through answer all their questions and yeah make sure that they are confident in the platform before they subscribe yeah also because then of course when they come on board it is a bit of a learning curve i think i already mentioned it it's a complex software because the industry is complex so it's a bit of a learning curve i think i already mentioned it so we yeah we want to make sure that it's also the right people using it that will be able and wanting to go up that learning curve and we'll actually see the value in grid cog and what have
Speaker 1you been noticing then over the last couple of years whilst you've been there in terms of the momentum that's building around that and the sort of the pipeline and the interest for the service you have
Speaker 3yeah that's a really good question we obviously used to focus way way more on gb at least in our london office where i'm based at some point we got a lot of organic pull from continental europe so in the beginning it wasn't really an active decision to move into expanded to continental europe we got more and more questions from especially the benelux in the beginning who have huge grid constraint problems so many many especially behind the meter companies are getting you know again weird grid connection dynamic grid connections or things like that and want to invest in energy assets to become more self-sufficient they would come to grid cook and be like hey i know you're uk based but um can we actually model in the netherlands as well which you know was that initial pull that we felt and then it went more and more into germany and now we're actually getting a lot of questions from front of meter developers in germany so usually big solar developers who are realizing that solar only is not actually that great of a investment case in germany anymore because there's so many negative prices now there's just so much solar now that if they're all generating at the same time yeah ultimately it puts their portfolio at a huge risk so what they want to do is they want to add batteries into their portfolios which is much more complex than solar ever was because batteries can do so many more things can trade in so many more markets but also battery technologies themselves obviously are very very complex yeah and that's kind of where we're currently feeling most of the
Speaker 2pull from yeah that's that's really nice it's kind of organically developed for you and that kind of people coming to you for that new opportunity for them where do you see kind of that german market expanding into
Speaker 3yeah so i think first of all they do really have to tackle large-scale batteries large-scale co-located battery solar systems to get that kind of level of smart flexibility into the grid but what is in my kind of personal opinion a really underused resource in germany is actually the fleet of residential batteries so i don't have the number off the top of my head but there's a huge amount of residential batteries connected to just solar on you know homes because residential energy tariffs are so high so people don't want to just not pay for supply tariffs or their utility bills when the sun is shining but they kind of they have invested in batteries to soak up that extra solar and basically become as self-sufficient as they can and so i think that's possible but all of these residential batteries are as we like to call them dumb batteries that really do just what i described so soak up excess solar and discharge it slowly into into the evening whereas all of these with a little bit of a and i might be a bit naive here but with a with a little bit of a more smart inverter system more smart technology kind of retrofitted almost could do so much good for the grid if they acted in a bit more of a smart way if they actually avoided congestion much more and could actually also through that make the owners of those battery systems could generate additional revenue for them as well rather than just cutting the cost of the utility bill it's actually
Speaker 1a really good point it's an area that power versus involved in and what you say about making those inverters smarter and making that low energy bi-directional is we believe a really important part of the solution
Speaker 2there you go great answer and laura what's happening in
Speaker 1germany sounds really exciting for your business i guess at the moment you're trying to attract more talent into grid cog as people are thinking about their careers or a move in their career what sort of things would attract them to to grid cog
Speaker 3yes i mean you're very right in saying that we are opening a office and hiring in in berlin and new talent in grid cog anyway yeah what i think or hopefully attracts smart people into grid cog is kind of the opportunity to work for the energy transition or let's say the opportunity to work for the energy transition while doing something analytical and intellectually complicated complex as well as having a lot of creative freedom if you want to put it that way so you know i've i mean talking about my experience in grid cog anyway i've never been told by anybody what my startup thing but i think for a lot of young motivated people that's super motivating and super that creates a lot of drive in terms of you can decide what you want to do next you can decide what actually would be good for the business and at the same time you're accompanying the whole industry to decarbonize and helping them really invest in the right projects that will ultimately help the energy transition
Speaker 1so good to hear a story about a business that's trying to do the job is and i've never been told by anybody what my business that's trying to do the right thing has got a great mission behind it but also it's got that entrepreneurial spirit of creating something out of nothing and giving everybody the opportunity to kind of contribute you can see why people would want to
Speaker 2join yeah definitely i mean a good example is um we were talking before this about the flexibility of your day so far today so it's allowed you to be here and have a good day um with your parents so um yeah i think flexibility is something that yeah we really think is important in the business as well yeah it is yeah
Speaker 3and more and more i think yeah hybrid hybrid working environment we do really put a lot of emphasis in spending time together in the office as well i mean we have of course we have an australian team we have a london team we'll have a german team we do want to be seen as one team and one company we have a annual retreat in bali actually to break oh lovely on
Speaker 2your website where have they gone
Speaker 3that doesn't
Speaker 1look like brighton to me yeah
Speaker 2richard i think this is something that how there should be let's take note one of the advantages
Speaker 1of having an australian
Speaker 3hq for sure yeah i mean it's the middle right um yeah but
Speaker 2then of course
Speaker 3we also often have early morning calls which is late for australia so there is some difficulty to juggle there yeah but um this time of year
Speaker 1is good now though isn't it you've just flipped over it just got worse it just got worse
Speaker 3because we change in the opposite direction yeah so now i think 7 a.m for us is like 6 p.m for that yeah i remember that daylight
Speaker 2saving was awful at this time of year yeah it's early morning calls for us yeah oh well i'm
Speaker 1sorry it's just gone that way i've totally misremembered that so um yeah earlier starts for everyone just
Speaker 3half a year and then we're out of yeah you can get through it
Speaker 2i think we've um got one final question for you which is what advice would you give to organizations looking to accelerate their own clean energy projects
Speaker 3i mean it's a super broad question it's obviously a really important question but it does really depend on what type of organization um we're talking about if we are talking about for example a what i would refer to as a behind the meter site like a supermarket a manufacturing site there are some kind of easier wins certainly that they could look into of course it's investing in renewables but it's also changing utility bills or energy supply contracts in my opinion i've been quite shocked at how many huge energy consumers are still on flat energy contracts and then of course investing in a battery makes a lot less sense than it could if they were kind of able to shift around some of the usage at more expensive times to usage at cheaper times so i think yeah going into that direction of becoming a little bit more flexible and yeah if i may take that into the general point of flexibility for our grid as well if a energy user becomes flexible that will become actually flexibility as well so become just as useful as let's say a standalone battery connected to the grid or even you know what used to be or what still is a gas turbine instead of an intermittent solar panel so that kind of flexibility can be provided from so many different angles but a behind the meter site or an energy user becoming flexible can do so much for them due to you know different pricing but also so much for the grid and the system so i think that's a really good point
Speaker 2flexibility fantastic thank you so much we've absolutely loved the conversation today it's been great to have you here thank you yeah it's been super fun
Speaker 1great thanks very much indeed if you enjoyed this episode don't forget to follow us on linkedin by searching powerverse or share it with someone who might find it helpful to find out more about our software visit our website www.powerverse.com thanks for listening to next time around until next time time.
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