Grid Decarbonisation at Scale: Can a Whole Country Go Net Zero?

In this episode of the Climate Confident podcast, I sat down with John Sturman, Managing Director at NatPower UK, to dig deep into the realities of grid decarbonisation and energy transition at nation scale.

John pulled back the curtain on how NatPower is scaling up battery storage and renewable projects not just in the UK, but across the globe. From developing Europe’s largest battery storage pipeline to pioneering power solutions for maritime decarbonisation, this conversation gets into the detail of what's needed to hit net zero — and what’s holding us back.

We discussed:

• Why the UK is currently one of the strongest global markets for battery storage
• The urgent grid reform needed to meet the UK’s 2030 clean power targets
• How long-duration battery storage could replace gas peaker plants sooner than expected
• The overlooked challenge (and opportunity) of decarbonising the shipping industry
• Why AI will be essential to balancing increasingly complex power grids
• And why empowering communities is critical to speeding up the clean energy build-out

John didn’t shy away from naming the bottlenecks — planning delays, outdated infrastructure, and regulatory barriers — but he also laid out practical fixes that could unlock faster deployment of clean power.

If you’re serious about understanding the mechanics behind the transition to a net zero grid, this is one you don’t want to miss.

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- The UK decarbonized green, it's gonna take us off gas. Imagine the impact that's gonna have on the economy where you no longer have huge fluctuations in gas prices, going from super high prices to very low gas prices. Nobody knows what gas prices are gonna be next year, for instance. How can a business plan? If you take gas completely off the network, the huge economic benefits for everybody, that story hasn't been told yet.- Hi everyone, welcome to the Climate Confident Podcast. My name is Tom Raftery and with me on the show today, I have my special guest, John. John, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?- Yeah, thanks very much, Tom. So I'm John Sturman. I'm the managing director of NetApp in the UK. We're involved in delivering net zero as soon as possible, in terms of what we're trying to do as a corporation, and specifically in the UK, looking to satisfy CP30, as I'm sure we'll speak about later in the podcast.- Yep, absolutely. So for people, John, who are not familiar with NetPower, give us a few top line numbers. Who is NetPower? Who are your clients? What do you do for them? That kind of thing.- We're a global renewable energy developer. We originated out of Italy. So our operational headquarters, if you like, is in Milan. We're active in quite a number of geographies globally. So we've got activities in Italy. I went to the UK markets just over two years ago. We're active in the US, in Chile, in Kazakhstan, in South Africa, Serbia, so we are a true international renewable energy developer. We actually originated out of an IPP. We sold off the operating assets of virtual renewable generators and retained the development tile. So NetPower has evolved into a pure developer. Historically, what we've delivered is, as an example, Europe's largest EV charging network. We delivered Italy's largest wind portfolio, for instance. So we tend to deliver very large portfolios. And then typically, we would manage those through to COD, so that's commercial operation. And then an investor would then take the majority of those projects. Now, investors tend to be the big pension funds of the world and the big infrastructure funds.- Okay, so you're developing massive renewable projects and selling them to typically pension funds.- Yeah, that's right. So people listening who have pensions, their pension may well hold some of our assets.- And you mentioned that you're in the UK. What is it that you're doing in the UK?- So when, as a company, we decided to go into the UK market, the biggest opportunity we identified was getting involved in battery storage. But typically, we're quite agnostic in terms of technology, as long as it's related to the energy transition. But the battery storage market was where we first started to look. So in the last two years, we've grown our presence in the UK from when we started just three individuals to now a team of over 70 people. We've delivered, in terms of our pipeline, the largest battery storage pipeline, not just in the UK, but certainly in Europe, in terms of our activities in the long term. And that's fully aligned with how we go about our business. So every country that we operate in, we try and make a real difference to that national setup in terms of their infrastructure. So we don't tend to go into a country and just do three or four projects. We try and make a real difference. And that's reflected in what we've delivered in terms of battery storage. So we're also now getting involved in doing large-scale solar and wind, now it's possible to do wind in the UK. So that's really exciting for us. And there's a couple of other areas that we're starting to get involved in, in terms of decarbonizing the marine sector. So that's an international activity for us, but that's going to be headquartered here in the UK. So just to move back to battery storage, we are delivering the largest projects and the largest portfolio. So a typical project for us in the UK would be a transmission connection of typically one gigawatt, and a four-hour storage system. So that would be four gigawatt hours of battery. That project would be the largest in Europe. We have at the moment in our pipeline around 15 of those projects in the UK. So they're very significant, large infrastructure projects. The cap for each one of those would be in the region of say 600, 700 million each. So very big projects.- Nice, okay. So two questions of that. A, why battery storage in particular in the UK? And B, more broadly, why decarbonization? What's the reasoning behind NatPower's wanting to decarbonize grids globally?- Okay, so on the first point, the UK is one of the best markets globally for battery storage out in the world. And that typically is driven by the 24-hour supply demand, position of the country, and what we call the ancillary services model. Ancillary services is basically looking for assets that can turn on and turn off quickly to keep the grid balanced. So we have to keep the frequency of the network balanced around 50 hertz so that it doesn't damage people's equipment, et cetera. It's about power quality, maintaining power quality. So National Grid has contracts held to those kind of assets that can balance the grid. And batteries are exceptionally good at that because you can turn them on and turn them off extremely quickly. Another example would be Pumptide Drive, for instance, where you can turn on large generation very, very quickly to keep the grid, what we call, balanced. Those services for balancing the grid are contracted by National Grid. So they initiated, if you like, the battery storage market here in the UK. So the first battery storage projects were their revenue was almost wholly contracts to balance the network. Those are now pretty much in capacity. So National Grid have all of those assets that they really need to keep grid balanced. But now the market of battery in the UK has moved towards what we call arbitrage. And that's how we're trading. So in effect, a battery doesn't generate power in and of itself. It simply enables you to trade power. So you can buy power from the grid when the price is low, and then push that power back into the grid where the power price is high. So most of the batteries now that are being developed are basically enablers for energy trading. Because the UK has a very peaky demand over 24 hours, there is a very, very high demand in the morning, and then even higher demand in the evening. That then tracks to power prices. And then in the middle of the night, say at two or three in the morning, when the demand is really low, the power price drops. So that's where the current markets are actually in play. But then also strategically going forward, especially given the new government that we had from last year, they have a target to completely decarbonize the grid by 2030. That means a huge addition of intermittent renewable power onto the network. And that's going to make the grid even more intermittent, which then again, gives longevity to the market for batteries to satisfy that intermittency. So that's why battery here in the UK. Other markets around the world are starting to emerge for batteries because they are also starting to decarbonize their grid and become more reliant on intermittent sources. So the battery markets around the world continue to evolve and continue to grow. Equally, the reduction in the cost of batteries is dramatic and it's taking the same curve the price of solar panels went through about 15 years ago, where you would never have imagined solar would be viable in northern latitudes and now it is because the price of those panels is so low. The same thing is happening to batteries. It's not economically viable now to deploy batteries where you otherwise wouldn't have thought about deploying batteries. And that's going to come to develop the battery market. Go on. So that's the first point. Why decarbonization? So that really came from our chairman and his passion for sustainability, trying to combat climate change. And so he moved into this sector himself personally. That's where we grew from as a business. We then now have a mixture of investors, a grid, and all of those investors are going on the same road that we're on. We're passionate about combating climate change. We also see that the future economic development of countries is going to be focused on decarbonization. The green jobs of the future, that's what we're focused on. As countries decarbonize, move away from fossil fuel generation and move into the clean power future that we're all driving towards, that's where the jobs are going to be. And I like to add as well, which is something that we are starting to get involved in, for instance, is the technology drive to things like AI, which is going to require a very, very large number of data centers. And they are extremely powerful.- Just to push back on that quickly for a second, not in the data center point, but more on the decarbonization one. Since the election of President Trump, we're starting to see a push back against moves towards decarbonization. So do you see that becoming a trend thereby putting your business in difficulty or danger, or do you think that is just a blip and exceptional and you're still on the right track?- Yeah, our view, Thomas, is that there are outliers. When you look internationally, and if you look at what goes on, for instance, in the UN, the way that countries voted in the UN, the vast majority of countries are still going down the road of decarbonization. And the change in politics that we see in the US, for instance, our view is that that is an outlier in terms of the international direction of Trump.- Okay, and the new German government?- Again, I'm sure most people were kind of taken aback by the result there. We'll wait and see how the coalition forms out of that, because it is an Asian coalition. The Green Party, always the extremely strong in Germany. They form part of the coalitions in recent political history in Germany. They're not going away. They have impacted the policy in Germany. If you look, just going back a few years, on what Germany has delivered, they did quite more similar in Germany than almost the whole of Europe put together, and Germany not being a Mediterranean country. So that was driven by the policy the Green Party were able to influence in the coalition. So yeah, the populist political movements that are coming to the fore, towards the right of politics, again, we still see them being mostly based upon one or two policies that have been used as political footballs. I don't think that's the core of what those companies are about when it comes to decarbonisation. We're still very, very confident that the international markets for decarbonisation are going to remain extremely strong. And we may well see the political moves that happened in the US, say, in five years' time, with regards to Donald Trump. It would only take a change of president, and not a big change in terms of policies of presidents in the US, and then they'll go straight back into the Paris Accords, for instance, which is exactly what Joe Biden did. So we've been there with Trump before. It was completely reversed by Biden. So yeah, we just think it's an outlier of the road.- Okay, coming back to the UK, the UK has ambitious net zero goals. How do you think the UK will manage to get off gas and fully decarbonise the grid by 2030, particularly in light of skyrocketing demand from the likes of AI and having to electrify everything? I mean, very often I say to people, you want to go net zero, first thing you do is make everything electric, and then switch to a renewable supplier. Now, that's easy for a company to do, relatively. A lot more difficult to do at a national level, no?- Yeah, absolutely. So to get to net zero, if you look at what net zero means, if you're talking about full decarbonisation of the entire economy, that's much harder to achieve than the decarbonisation of the grid. Decarbonisation of the grid is the first step, which tends to be the easiest step to do, because as you quite rightly pointed out, it's a lot easier to decarbonise the electricity network than it, for instance, would be in terms of things like transport, particularly airline transport, domestic heating is going to be something that's going to need a lot more attention, for instance, but particularly in the UK to get the UK off gas. We look at decarbonisation of the grid first, and the plan in the UK, and this is what would need to be delivered, and this target is a quadrupling of offshore wind, a doubling of onshore wind, and a tripling of solar. Now, that's a huge, a huge challenge to the industry to deliver that on the ground by 2030. And what you'll see is a slightly nuanced message that's coming out of the government, where now they're saying, we are looking at maybe having a 5% unabated gas emissions aspect in what they're calling Green Power 2030. Our view is 2030 is going to be an extremely difficult date to meet. The quadrupling of offshore wind is probably the most challenging to deliver, given that it's had some recent difficulties in terms of getting to some energy clubs, or some of the big projects that we've seen recently. But the intermittency that that's going to add into the grid, as I mentioned at the start, that's why we got involved in battery storage, that can be almost completely satisfied by what is happening in the battery storage market. So what we're seeing now, because of the reduction in prices for batteries, the improved technology, so now a single battery storage unit would, for instance, be about a five megawatt capacity. And so only maybe three or four years ago, a single battery unit would just be one megawatt. So we're seeing improved energy densities, we're seeing improved cycling abilities for batteries, they need much, much less maintenance, for instance, you're getting much better warranties on your batteries, so electric clothes, projects is getting much easier. So the whole battery market in terms of technology and price is really, really evolving rapidly. As an example, with the price reduction that we're seeing for batteries, they will be cost competitive against pumped hydro in terms of long duration storage. And that's what we need, it should drive a lot of things on the system, is long duration storage. It will be cost competitive against pumped hydro, as an example for a 12 hour storage asset, by around 2028, 2021. So it would then become financially viable to build a 12 hour battery storage asset, rather than a pumped hydro storage asset in terms of financial viability. So you're seeing that long duration storage of batteries is increasing year on year. And certainly by the mid 2030s, we think that a battery storage asset that can store power and raise power for 24 hours is going to be viable. So it seems extremely likely that batteries are going to be satisfying the vast majority of intermixing algorithms. And certainly by 2035, there may be a need to have, as the UK government is saying, some kind of unabated gas sat on the network, mothballed, just in case of those few occasions in the year where you have low sun, the UK, no wind, and very large demand. And that periods are very, very short, you know, they tend to be less than 24 hours, and they don't happen very often, maybe three or four days. So that's where pushing gas off the system is going to, in our view, be facilitated by long duration battery storage a lot sooner than what you guys are predicting. It's not going to be 5% of unabated gas on the network by 2030. We can do that, we want to deliver. It might only be 1%, for instance. And then you've got new long duration storage technology that come in, it's not straight. It could also satisfy storage, but beyond the 20th round. So it's absolutely deliverable today by 2030, but just the effort that it's going to take to build out those renewable assets, we think it might be 2032, 2033, when we do end up with a clean power, 2030 network system, in terms of what we're doing.- I'm curious, though, in that kind of scenario, where you have mothballed gas that might be turned on two or three times a year max, who's going to develop that? Because the return on investment for developing a gas plant that's going to be turned on two or three times a year is going to be in the centuries, unless they're charging ridiculous amounts for turning themselves on, which in the UK market, when the price of electricity is dictated by the highest contributor to the market, means suddenly the price for consumers will spike to hundreds of pounds per kilowatt hour.- Yeah, so we already have those gas plants in the UK. They're called gas peakers, because they only turn on when you've got peak demand. So it wouldn't need construction in your gas plants. We have existing gas plants that can converge to be gas peakers. So in terms of your capital expenditure, it's already there. The incentive that we think would need to be put in place would be specific payments in the capacity market. So the capacity market in the UK is already very active. Assets can fit into that capacity market simply by having an asset that's sent on the network, adding capacity to the network, that can turn on and can turn off when needed. So all it would need would be a specific payment to gas peakers at the right price in that capacity market that already exists to finance them just being sat there for most of the year. The cost for having them sat there is very low. The biggest cost for gas peakers is actually the gas itself. So yes, it is possible to do that for the cost that that would incur on the network, where they're only active for a few days a year. Yes, they will be receiving large payments to sit there. But when you take the whole network and cost and the power price that can be delivered for renewables, which is gonna lower everybody's electricity prices, those few days, those extra payments you give to those gas peakers will disappear within hours.- Looking at the UK's current transition, where do you think the UK is doing well and where are they dropping the ball?- Doing well, great target, clean power 2030, great for the industry. So there's political will, which is the main thing you need. So that's all positive. We know we can deliver on the ground in terms of the assets. That's not an issue for us. But as I'm sure everybody who is used to your course on, and this is common for most countries around the world, it all comes down to the grid issue. And this is common for most countries. There is a network issue when you are going through the energy transition. You're moving away from a system where you had very few centers of generation, which tended to be coal, fire, power plants, very big, very lumpy assets with a transmission network connection, not very granular transmission network, just a few big lines into these big lumpy assets. And we're moving away from that. So the grid has to evolve and it's not evolved fast enough. And there's been a lack of investment in the grid in the UK. National grid is known, for instance, that the country is moving towards greater renewables on the network. That's been happening for 16 years. So it's not a new thing. So the investment in the grid has fallen behind. And with this new government wanting a decarbonized grid by 2030, now the required grid upgrades and network upgrades are a very, very big challenge. So we're going through a grid reform process at the moment that's being led now by the system operator. I don't think it's a coincidence that the government purchased the system operator last year. We'll see how that grid reform evolves. The proposals that we have seen at the moment, we don't think are generally going to satisfy what the network needs in terms of storage out to 2035, because unfortunately the system operator has now, what we think is a market overreach. They have now decided to set technology targets, technology limits, not targets, for each zone in the UK. And once that technology limit has been reached, they are going to withdraw all new grid connection opportunities. The difficulty that we see in that approach, certainly for package storage, is we've got a very, very large number of applicants right now wanting to connect projects. All of those projects are two-hour systems, and most of them tend to be quite small assets. And what the system operator is doing is saying that once those tech limits have been reached, they're not going to enable any more new connections until beyond 2035. The difficulty we have is that probably this year, all of those connections that relate to meeting that zone or capacity will be taken. And it'll be taken entirely by two-hour batteries. And then the system is going to need longer duration battery storage from 2035 onwards. So in effect, you're baking into the network by setting those zone limits. A battery network on the grid that is not set for purpose in the future, certainly from 2030 and beyond that. So as a company, we've actually had to question to the Ofgem, the UK regulator on this. They accept what we advise them. So we'll wait and see whether or not there's a tweak in grid reform to enable longer duration battery storage capacity on the network, 'cause that's what the system's going to need. And it's now possible to deliver much longer duration battery storage cost effectively. So there are tweaks that we see are needed. There's been an appraisal of storage that happened when grid reform started two years ago that is old school. It was based on where the battery market was two years ago, and it's not moved with where we are today. Additionally, in terms of what's needed, I think we need changes to the planning system much more rapidly than is currently happening. So the government did change the regulations for onshore wind to enable onshore wind to happen, certainly in England. We need to see more dramatic changes to the planning network to enable us to deliver those projects by 2030. It's not going to be possible unless the ability to approve renewable projects on a much larger scale is taken away from where it sits at a level, which is local authorities. Our view is that the delivery of Clean Power 2030 is a national strategic aim that the government's trying to achieve. And we believe that the decisions to enable that to happen should be taken centrally rather than locally. Yes, we accept that we need to engage with local communities where our projects are going to go, and we can deliver huge community benefits alongside our projects, which we do. We always like to be rapid leaders in that regard. So as an example, for instance, one of our battery projects, a typical one, we will commit to giving up to a million pounds per year for the local community. You can have significant change locally. And so we're not doing what most developers do where they would give, say, 20 or 30,000 pounds a year as a community fund. We want to bring communities along with us. So that's all possible. But the decision to give planning permits to these assets does need to be more centrally managed because locally it's taking too long to deliver. Most projects, certainly wind projects, tend to get refused locally. The developers then have to go to an appeal process so that it's then determined at a national level, and then you get a permit after you've gone to appeal. So it's not a very streamlined system you've got to run. So that for us needs to change fundamentally if we're going to be able to do that.- And in terms of the upgrading of the grid, how much of that needs to be physical versus how much of it can be done using digitization and software?- The software and the digitization that happens centrally with natural grid to ensure that the system is balanced has been upgraded recently. It needed to be upgraded because obviously, as I mentioned before, you're moving away from where you could push a button to turn on a big gas peak plant at 400 megawatts. Power comes onto the system, large power comes onto the system by just pushing a button for a single asset, and that's very easy. But now, given that we've got a much more distributed generation base, you've got lots of small batteries now that are coming on the system, you've got more renewable assets, you need to monitor what's going on, your modeling of power generation needs to be very, very sophisticated. But that has happened. In terms of infrastructure and physical assets on the ground, that's where I think we are still a long way behind. We have a issue, like a monopoly position in the UK where the transmission network is fully owned by a single entity, natural grid. It's a private company, which is for us quite strange to have a monopoly in this day and age that's a private company. And it's down to them to deliver that transmission infrastructure. And even if you wanted to develop an asset that connects into the local network, you still have to refer back to transmission network because plugging in a local level may require some transmission upgrades. So it all comes back to the transmission upgrades that are needed for all the assets. Our position on that is we need competition in that market. We're actually trying to drive that forward ourselves. What we would like to do, and we can finance this, is build our own transmission substations underneath the transmission lines ourselves and deliver them ourselves. We can finance those ourselves, we can deliver them, we know we can deliver them fast enough. So we can deliver new points of connection on the transmission network that will enable large amounts of new renewables to come onto the system in areas where at the moment there's just no point of connection. And they may be extremely good locations for all the new assets to sit. And they simply haven't been developed because there isn't a large point of connection. We've identified six of those locations on the network so far ourselves where we would like to deliver the substations. And new substation at the moment, we're talking around 100 million investment. So we're waiting to put 600 million of our own investment into the UK network. We currently cannot do that because the electricity license requirements that are set with National Grid prevents us from doing that. We need National Grid to change the green light, obviously we're engaging with the regulator on this, trying to enable it to happen. Hopefully we can get there. We already have the ability for competition at the district level. So we have what's called an IDNL, an independent distributed network operator. We don't have an ITNL, an independent transmission network operator. Because you need a license for that, often need to change the regulations for them not to happen. We're hoping that that will happen. But again, it's all about timing. It needs to happen yesterday. We can deliver that additional infrastructure. The issue that National Grid have, as you might see in the market, is they've had to do a huge fundraising round over the last 12 months to get the investment required to deliver what's needed for CP30. So you have a single company struggling to raise sufficient clients to deliver what's needed to upgrade the transmission network. So for us, again, it's not the purpose. So that needs to change.- You mentioned briefly earlier, AI, mentioning it in passing. I think it's something we need to dig into seeing as everyone's talking about AI. And AI obviously is transforming lots of industries at the moment. What role do you see it playing in making the energy grid smarter? And obviously with AI's own energy demand increasing massively, will that slow down the transition or will it be part of the solution or a bit of both?- So AI has the ability to lower customer prices. That's fundamental. As we have many, many more very generation assets on the network, you might have a single wind turbine in the South of England. You might have a five megawatt solar project in England. And you might have a 60 megawatt battery project in the Northwest. You're having multiple different assets at the generation level than we did historically. And storage assets. Equally on the demand side, now that demand users are connecting smartly to Spring Syncs so you can monitor the demand side. To optimize the grid will require some kind of AI in the future. Because it's only AI that can manage that large, diverse generation and demand on the grid cost-effectively. So it definitely has a place. Equally, trading, we believe, is gonna move away from half-hour trades. So at the moment, the UK stock market is trading in half-hour blocks. Again, that doesn't optimize pricing. Moving towards five-minute trading blocks, or even less, where power is traded in very, very short periods to optimize those trades. All of that is going to bring down pricing. So it has to be the direction of travel. For us, it's simply how quickly is it going to be implemented. And it's only AI that can manage that complexity, where you then go from half-hour trades to five-minute trades. And you're then optimally looking at your network. Which assets do you turn on, which do you turn off? How do you price solar in a particular five minutes in a particular part of the country to optimize prices for the consumer, et cetera? And on top of that, laid on top of that, which is an increasingly complex modeling requirement, is looking at weather patterns. In granular detail across the country. So you can forecast, for instance, on a very, very short timeframe, what is the wind generation going to be for a particular wind farm in a particular location, and solar in a particular part of the country on a particular day. When we look at weather forecasting, the Met Office does for the UK, they have supercomputers running incredibly sophisticated models already to forecast the weather. So putting that into the grid network with all the complexity that's going to come, absolutely is going to need AI. But it's going to result in much lower prices for consumers.- You mentioned at the very start as well that NatPower is now getting into the maritime space as well. Talk to me a little bit about that.- This is being missed. This space is being missed by, certainly by the UK government, I think by most governments internationally. It's decarbonization of transport in terms of onshore, so cars and trucks. Everybody's aware of that. Everybody's taking it into their modeling in terms of the uptake of electrification of that sector. The electrification of the shipping industry seems to be missing. The shipping industry have been sitting on the fence in terms of the direction of travel for decarbonization of vessels. Whether they went down the hydrogen route, whether they go for biofuels or electrification. What we're now seeing emerging is, as we did in the car industry, they moved away from hydrogen and they focused on electrification batteries. That's happened in shipping industry. Because the price of batteries has come down dramatically, the energy density has gone up so high. We have a requirement already in terms of legislation in Europe where when vessels come alongside, they have to turn their engines off and they have to plug into the power supply port. That was actually mostly driven by the air polishing issue with vessels at ports running their engines to maintain the power supply that they needed in the vessel while they were onside. And it's one of the dirtiest fuels in the world, onshore, very, very thick, heavy oil. So vessels now come onside and they have to plug into the power supply at the ports. That requirement is now spreading internationally. So that's the first thing that needs to be taken into account is all the vessels in your country suddenly now plugging into shore power and requiring power. And the additional power demand that that requires from the network is much, much higher than anybody has considered in the past. So decarbonizing the shipping industry is gonna put an increasing volume on the demand side at your network. And it's intermittent. It's dependent on when the vessels come alongside. What we're also now seeing emerge is the electrification of the proportional vessel. So we're already seeing orders being placed, for instance, a fully electric cross-channel service from day to time. So not only are you having to supply the power of the vessels when they're onside, you now also have to charge the batteries up when they're alongside. So we've got fully electric orders being placed for short trips now, vessels that do short trips. The next stage will be, what we think is gonna happen is the hybridization of the international vessels that do long distance. Because obviously at the moment, it's not possible to supply those vessels with propulsion that's purely electric the entire duration of say a 10,000 kilometer journey.- Yeah.- So the next step is going to be hybridization. We think that that's gonna take the form of batteries being placed on those vessels that when they are, for instance, within 200 nautical miles of their port, they have to turn off their engines and go from electric. So that's gonna be the next stage that we see in the shipping industry for those type of vessels. Now, what is the long term propulsion solution? It's still up in the air. We believe that it's probably gonna be biofuels with a mixture of batteries. So it's a hybrid battery biofuel propulsion in those type of vessels. So when you model out the power requirements for the international shipping industry at various ports, what we're finding is that the majority of ports that we looked at around the world don't have a sufficient power supply today to be able to satisfy what the vessels are going to need to decarbonize. And so part of what we're doing as our business is looking to resolve that. So we are developing now solutions whereby we will deliver additional power supply to the ports. We'll put battery storage at the ports to help with the intermixing issue. And we're also going to start installing plugs and common plugs that the vessels can plug into when they're at the berth. And a typical plug will be five to 10 megawatts each. So they are not slow. Are you talking about two or 3 million capex for each plug? So that's what we're getting involved in internationally. What we're trying to do as well is strategically target where we deliver those assets so that a particular shipping company can have a solution with that power marine so we can supply them with power at each one of the ports that their ships stop at on their typical route.- If you could wave a magic wand and instantly fix one thing about the UK's energy transition, what would it be?- Can I have a few wands?(laughing) For me at the moment, it would be enabling an independent party to deliver their own grid connections because grid is the biggest issue, I think, for the whole of the industry in the UK is getting connection. And National Grid have under-invested in the grid under-invested, they're gonna struggle to meet requirements of CP30. We believe that if we can deliver our own under the people's connections, we will not only unlock the lock jam in connection, but we will also enable a greater amount of renewables onto the network sooner for everybody by creating new parts.- Okay, left field question for you, John. If you could have any person or character, alive or dead, real or fictional, as a spokesperson or an evangelist for grid decarbonization, who would it be and why?- Ooh, what a question. Probably one of my heroes of Einstein, I think if he were alive today, given the respect that he has and everybody knows him internationally, if he were to be our spokesperson for grid decarbonization, I'd say that would be an incredible thing to see. Everybody would pay attention.- Nice, nice, I like it, great. John, we're coming towards the end of the podcast. Is there any question I did not ask that you wish I did or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?- I think just the point on community engagement to me is important. When you look at what you're trying to deliver on the ground as a passionate energy transition company, there is a lot of opposition generally locally. There's a lot of misinformation on the assets that we like delivering in the market. I think that came from propositioning that industry when renewables really started to take off, wasn't addressed correctly. I think if we can bring local communities more along the journey with us and give them real tangible benefits for hosting projects, to make that a much smoother ride, to actually deliver those assets, that for me needs a lot more attention, a lot more focus. When you look at general surveys for a population, say in the UK, the vast majority of people are premiums, the vast majority. But a lot of assets get turned down because the local communities where those assets are going are not brought on site. Particularly, for instance, when it comes to things like visual impact of wind turbines, I mean, it's a very subjective view as to whether a wind turbine looks graceful or is a blight on the landscape. I'm not talking about putting them in national parks, I'm just talking about putting them in the general landscape. So the best solution is to get local community on site. The alternate solution, which is not optimal, is to have decisions made centrally, as I mentioned earlier, to enable them to be delivered. But the population does need to be brought further into the argument and seeing justification for why we're doing what we're doing. That it is going to better the economy. It's, for instance, for the UK, decarbonised green, it's going to take us off gas. Imagine the impact that's going to have on the economy where you no longer have the huge fluctuations in gas prices, going from super high prices to very low gas prices. Nobody knows what gas prices are going to be next year, for instance. How can a business plan? If you take gas completely off the network, the huge economic benefits for everybody, that story hasn't been told yet. So I think we have a public relations issue that we need to address. That, to me, would need a lot more investigation, a lot more questions. How do we do that? How is it best to deliver that? How do you get local people more involved? And how do you get the national story across to people? Where you do have the likes of Donald Trump that's saying, "Drill, baby, drill." It doesn't make sense economically. So that, for me, I think, would be an energy investigation.- John, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?- The NetPow website. We've got a very good NetPow website. People can go look at the website, see the projects that you're doing. I've got my programs on Intents, where people can go there and look at my background. I'm more than happy for them to message me as well if they want to do that. I don't know.- Great, fantastic. John, that's been fascinating. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.- You're welcome, Tom. Thanks for having me.- Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks, everyone, for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery@outlook.com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you liked the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.