David Mack: Solar O&M, Rural Growth and Resilience

This episode examines the operational backbone of the utility scale solar industry through a conversation with David Mack, CEO of a group of companies delivering services to solar projects across the UK, Ireland and the United States.

Mack describes growing up on a farm in North Norfolk where his parents attempted to develop a wind turbine project in the 1990s. After his mother passed away when he was 8, the project remained a lasting influence. Decades later he revived the scheme and eventually delivered the turbine in 2022 after years of planning inquiries and legal challenges. The experience shaped his commitment to renewable energy and rural enterprise.

The discussion explores how renewable energy projects can diversify farm income and create employment in rural communities. From this background Mack founded Everblue in 2015, focusing on operational services such as module cleaning, land management and environmental compliance. The wider group now includes SolarYield in the United States, AgriSolar which advises on biodiversity and agricultural integration and Novola, a geospatial platform for managing solar assets.

A central theme of the episode is the operational complexity of large solar farms. Mack explains that scaling operations across gigawatt portfolios requires disciplined systems, training and repeatable processes. Small design decisions such as cable routing or inverter placement can significantly increase maintenance costs over a 30 to 40 year asset life.

The conversation also addresses safety risks associated with photovoltaic systems. Solar farms can appear quiet and low risk but panels operate at high direct current voltages that remain energised in sunlight. Proper procedures, insulated equipment and stronger safety awareness are essential during maintenance activities such as module cleaning.

Finally the episode reflects on the rapid growth of the solar sector, which has expanded to roughly 3 terawatt peak globally and could reach around 75 terawatt peak by mid century. Both speakers emphasise that the long term success of solar will depend not only on construction but on disciplined operations, maintenance and systemised industry practices that can scale worldwide.

 00:00 Introduction and global solar context
 00:48 David Mack background and early renewables exposure
 03:04 Losing his mother and reviving the family wind project
 05:15 Growing up on a farm in North Norfolk
 06:45 Farming economics and renewable diversification
 08:59 Planning battles and wind turbine opposition
 13:21 Renewable development and community acceptance
 18:11 Everblue group businesses and solar services
 22:30 Operating solar portfolios at gigawatt scale
 24:39 Systemising solar O&M operations
 28:07 Solar safety risks and high voltage DC hazards
 34:30 Solar farm design and long term O&M costs
 38:54 Repowering challenges and technology evolution
 44:13 Solar development and rural economic growth
 46:25 Mental health and isolation in rural industries
 49:53 The future of solar photovoltaics
 58:47 Global solar growth toward 75 terawatt
 1:01:11 Closing reflections on scaling solar 

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Future of Solar Photovoltaics podcast. My name is Vikram Kumar. We are now being listened to in over 91 countries. We're getting a tremendous following in the utility scale and engineering sector in solar, in batteries, in EVs, in grid connection, specifically in solar, EPC, O&M and development. Today, I've got the absolute pleasure of having one of the best O&M specialists in the industry with probably close to 40 % market share in large scale O&M following on from Mr. Clark Frost yesterday and the Heathcote Holdings team, who are one of the major contractors from Cleve Hill Solar Farm. So today I've got the absolute pleasure of welcoming Mr. David Mack to our podcast. David, welcome. Good to be here. Thanks for having me. Fantastic. Do want to start by introducing yourself, by speaking about your early life, your background? Yes, no problem. I'm David Mack. I'm the CEO of a group of companies that provide services to utility scales solar accross the UK, Ireland and the USA. I began early life being surrounded by... renewable energy. My parents, grandparents were very interested and relatively pioneering at the time in supporting wind and then solar, landfill gas off opportunities that were found on my family farm. And I think wind was something that was stuck in my mind from an early age because unfortunately during a... fight for a four turbine wind project on our family farm in North Norfolk. My mum passed away and then my dad focused his efforts on making sure that his farm business was working and myself and my other three brothers were looked after okay. it almost felt like a pivotal thing in my life where I thought something my mother had and father wanted to do, my mother was no longer there, my dad had to forget that because he had his other focuses. So I always remembered that and then once I was old enough to start to think about career options and during my university life where, funnily enough, I studied music, not renewable, a slight tangent off into renewable energy. I started looking at opportunities for wind in doing that, found opportunities to develop solar as well and developed and delivered a number of wind and solar projects, all pretty small scale, certainly by today's standards. And that led us to the point where we started Everblue in 2015. And then that's when we got into the operation and maintenance side of business. But yeah, that's, I suppose, a brief summary of the journey that took me from childhood to solar. Bereavement is a terrible thing. You know, I'm sorry to hear that. you think you know someone. and then you really get to know them and your whole perspective changes. I want to ask you specifically, how old were you when you were with the unfortunate passing of your mother and what did you do in terms of education? When did you get into music? Why did you drop out of music? And when did you decide you want to get into wind turbines? So my mother passed away when I was 8 so quite young, she was only 33. And I suppose, as I said, the trigger for me being interested in renewables was the memory of her and my father pursuing wind. I was old enough for at 8 to remember some of those conversations and meetings they were having and their excitement around it. Ingrained in my family history. was something my mum believed in. I suppose it then took me, being a kid and growing up, to then start to think about it in my late teens. And that's when I got into, started that project again, that very project that my mother and father had started in about 1990, I believe. We then started up again when I was in my late teens, as I said. And that sort of stayed bubbling away in the background through three public inquiries, two high court hearings. It was a really contentious project for a single stick wind turbine scheme. It's just under a megawatt. And we then did all sorts of other things. Solar started Everblue and behind the scenes that was carrying on. We got permission in think 2020 and built it in 2022. So it took from 1990 to 2022 to deliver a single wind turbine project. But it was amazing to deliver that and to see it running now being something that was started by my mother and father and delivering that. It quite a lot. was quite an emotional thing to see the cranes putting it up on the day. was incredible. 8 is a very young age to to lose a family member, you know and in fact my company Ventus means wind in Latin because my idea was to get into the wind business and and my early experiences were training people to jump out of wind turbines. I remember visiting Dong Energy who are now called Orsted So, you know people that don't know Norfolk or the area, you know, it's very alien to them. I've driven there to see Brett Baber's company launch with Thanos after he left Belectric. Paint a picture about your farming background, your surroundings, what is it like to live and work in Norfolk. Well, it's sort of in-built in me being in the countryside in Norfolk. I've moved around a bit and I travel a lot with work and I'm always pleased to be back in North Norfolk and the countryside of my home. I grew up on a small family farm. My dad's still in... still farms the land and runs that side of the family business. But yeah, it's amazing. Even with the challenges of my childhood, it's amazing place to grow up. near the countryside, beach and all of that. So it's somewhere that's extremely special to me. and somewhere that I'm planning on moving away from any time soon. But I'm also pleased that now my children are having an opportunity to grow up there too. Tell us what kind of farming your family gets involved in and what stage do you decide .. I want a wind turbine? Well, I suppose you might see in various different types of media, especially in utility scale solar industry, it quite heavily entwines with agriculture. you may come across the need for diversification within agriculture. Food production, unfortunately, is not particularly profitable exercise in most cases, especially when it's small farms. So farm in families, especially the scale that my family's is, we have to look at ways to diversify both to stabilise the quite a risky business model with influences from weather and disease and various other things that can affect crop and yield. But also if you've got a family, than you want. So it's okay for my father to farm, but on a small farm that is barely enough income for one person. So unless my brothers and I... then thought, okay, well, we want to develop a business that then grows and is able to sustain us as well as our father and keep that farming business going. we were forced into diversification. at the time, and obviously still now, renewable energy is a good thing to get into. It's a growing industry. We all believe in what renewable energy can deliver for the country and for the world. So it seemed like a really natural place to start. And we've got other diversifications within our farming business. but they're all relatively small. There's definitely the biggest potential for us and the family and also the wider community because as a result of all of the ventures that we've done to diversify, we're now employing local people and bringing employment opportunities to a rural area, which is something that's... not often achieved. A lot of employment in our areas, either agriculture or tourism, both of which aren't particularly well paid. it's nice to bring some industry into that area and to employ people. Fantastic. The reason why I use the football analogy is because when you're a parent on the other side it's easy to be a backseat driver and a comment but when you're coaching or playing you see a different side of it and I tie this point to NIMBYism because in a lot of papers you read a lot, you hear a lot of people in the pub talking about, you know, we need to protect the countryside, we need to keep the land for farming, but if there are no farmers in business who's gonna do the farming, so we need to protect the countryside, you know, how do you deal, why did you end up in the high court over a wind turbine, and how do you deal with this, the concerns about biodiversity and protecting the countryside and not using prime agricultural land for solar? It's a good question. It's quite complex. It's something I'm relatively passionate about. And I'm not one of those people really that is saying at all costs deliver solar and wind. I do think it's a balance. And I've been through the planning system a number of times, through renewables and also other types of projects. And it is a balance. You need to make sure that the scheme that you're delivering is not adversely impacting people's lives. I'm a big fan of solar development, but there are occasions where perhaps solar is put in the wrong place. When it is put in the incorrect place from a society perspective, you try and objectify, if that's the right expression, landscape impact, visual impact, environmental health when it comes to noise and smells. You try to try and objectively... assess that when you're planning. But it's really difficult to do and it's difficult to get right, especially from, as I said, a community perspective. So I'm really conscious of sensitively locating any infrastructure, whether it's solar wind or otherwise, because if we don't do it, it creates, I think wind got it wrong. Wind created an environment where the Conservative government decided policy that effectively banned it. And that was because I think the developers just pushed it too hard and put wind in the wrong locations and created a negative atmosphere around wind across the whole country, which meant that the Conservatives thought, we're going to put something in place now to gain votes, but at the detriment of the wind industry, which I still think is a good industry that should be promoted. And I just worry that we're doing the same thing with some solar farms, but going back to our wind project, clearly ending up in high court is not something that happens within... a site that's not contentious. There were lots of people that didn't want wind in North Norfolk. There was an anti-group. But part of the thing that drove me, even though I'm passionate about locating wind and solar in the right locations, the thing that really drove me to say, I'm not stopping. We're going to go through these processes. We're going to find them and carry on, was that I felt like I'd got the right location. There's a lot of people that were worried about change. And that's something that's been in-built in all human beings. I think most people get used to their environment and they want, they don't want it to change. They want to see the same view that, and if something goes into planning, they worry, is it going to be too noisy? Is it going to cause all sorts of detrimental things to my health? There's lot of very interesting objections that came out of the woodwork when we put the application in, including being a navigational aid to aircraft, These are things where people were convincing themselves, probably through searching on the internet, that this wind project was going to cause these problems to them. That was horrible to see, but I needed to get to the point where we delivered it so that everyone could see. It wasn't as bad. We were locating it in the right place. It wasn't going to cause some problems. And I keep now and again asking local authority whether they've had any comments and there's just been nothing. Everyone's accepted it. Some people that live in the village say to me, and this is genuine, when are you going to build that project? It's already over there. It's already built. So it's interesting. I am really passionate about the correctly locating projects. And that is a difficult thing to achieve. And I think it's even more difficult as we go towards more more NSIP projects. I see that communities being surrounded by solar, know, circling villages. I do ask myself, I mean, obviously, I'm a big believer in solar, so don't let this statement make you think otherwise. I'm a big, I'm very concerned about those projects turning communities against renewable energy. And I think now, given what's happening in the world, this is the very time we need to make sure that communities in the UK and globally but in the UK are really on board with self-sufficient, self-generated power in the UK and think Renewable Energy has got a big part to play in that. So we don't want to make it political. We don't want to make it political, but at the same time, I think being paralysed by fear and inaction is also not something that I look up to. Because if you again look at the football analogy in Wembley stadium, you can have 80,000 fans, a third of them could be shouting abuse, and they could be louder than the ones that are actually supporting. But there's only 22 players on the pitch, plus the subs. And if you put yourself in the shoes of the people that actually do things, you are on the receiving end of that abuse. I researched a lot of podcasts, Lex Friedman, he's very talented, he did a podcast with the Prime Minister of India, and he says, criticize, but criticize after you have deep domain knowledge about something. Absolutely. Your criticism, if they're just backseat driving, even if you're a parent, if you're backseat driving, you can have a detrimental impact. You're constantly seeing in the media, on social media, lot of incorrect information about renewable energy and it's frustrating because as you said, I'm all for criticising, especially this new industry that's expanding really quickly. There are a lot of things that we could criticise and improve about renewable energy but to see things in the media that are just completely untrue, it's just not helpful. And I agree with you you it's very easy to stand by, read a headline that says Solar's bad because of X, Y and Z and then jump on the bandwagon and just shout about it to your friends and social media. It's easy to do that but it's not that helpful. Absolutely. And I'm good friends with Clive Cosby. I've been talking to him for over 10 years now. One of our early podcasts, the second one was building largest solar projects. But I'm a big believer in turnover is vanity, but profit is sanity. Just sometimes you make more profit from a well-executed 1 megawatt C&I project where we did the AC design, for example, for Farnborough Airport. Then you would chasing .. Cleve Hill You do it because it's almost, if you are a solar enthusiast, how could you not have an interest in the largest project in the country? Probably in the top 20 in Europe, if not higher. And so I think that the political element is important because... You know, we have now the age of disinformation. We had the Cold War, then we had the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then we had the financial crisis in 2008. And that's how I got into wind and solar. But we are in an age of disinformation. You know, energy, I still haven't got over the fact how big the industry is. Everything's driven by energy. We've got two energy wars literally happening right now in Ukraine and in Iran. And we can see the impact of that. So energy is one area where politics, You know, finances, war, all of it intersects. So it's natural as we start going towards NSIP, nationally significant infrastructure projects of 500 megawatt plus in scale, there's even two gigawatt projects in development in England now. When we go to that level, because we need to make a dent, know, solar, if you look on EMBER think tank, is a decimal point. in terms of the general energy use in the world and you're not going to reach net zero by thinking small at the same time in C&I projects you can have you know other additional fire risks you have to be careful of you know if you put people don't want industrial solar panels but then they want to put them on buildings and if they're not executed well you've got fire risk there so that leads nicely towards uh your businesses do you want to start by introducing yourself with respect to what businesses you're a part of and what your current focus is? Yeah, why not? Part of our group, we've got three businesses that focus on delivering varying services to utility scale solar in the UK, Ireland and the US. I'll run through them. Everblue Solar is an O&M services provider. So we're not an O&M company. We provide services to either O&Ms or to asset managers, owners, EPCs of solar farms. And we cover services like solar module cleaning on scale, land management that can include simple things like grass cutting and herbicide application or weed management all the way to planning compliance, biodiversity management, plan compliance and scheduling and working with ecologists to make sure that those things are delivered in accordance with either planning conditions or 106 agreements that are now coming in for the BNG sites. So we also add on things like we can deliver drone surveys and a few other maintenance tasks. And part of everything that we do within Everblue we provide in-depth reports on... what's on site. So we try to add more and more value because we understand that with solar ESG is a big thing and we need to make sure that we make the most out of every single visit. The journey to the site is most expensive part. Once you're there, let's make sure we gather as much information for our clients so they don't have to go there again, for example. We need to reduce visits, reduce fuel use. So that's a big thing for us. Also within Everblue, we've got SolarYield LLC which is our US version of Everblue and we cover between Texas and to North Carolina. We're module cleaning around 2GW of solar in the US. But that's a very, very small market share compared to what we're doing in the UK and in Ireland. The potential there is huge. So that's quite an exciting venture and that's been going a couple of years now, very successfully. And AgriSolar is one of the other businesses. That's our consultancy. We spend a lot of time either looking at biodiversity management plans pre-planning or pre-construction and making sure they align with the primary use of the land, which is going to be a solar farm. So making sure that what's being delivered to and promised to create the credits that are needed to get the planning and the BNG credits can actually be delivered in unison with the operation of solar farm. And that's quite rare. There's a lot of conflicts normally with what's being promised. So trying to intervene and say let's do this, this way, this, this way to make sure that everything gets done and you're not in a situation where there's shade. A good example is let's put wildflowers everywhere. They grow too tall. They shade the front of the modules. Then suddenly we've got to cut the wildflowers down in the prime season to get rid of the shading. So it's just a small example, which is a good one on how sometimes there's a conflict between the two things. So we do a lot of that and then we do a lot of auditing. AgriSolar will go and audit compliance on site, whether that's planning compliance, biodiversity management, We do things like condition checks, bespoke checks that our clients come up with. And then the last company is our software as a service business, Novola It's geospatial management tool. And that's entwined in the other companies. We deliver a lot of our reports to our clients on it. But also it says software as a service is available to anyone. industry. We've built it on the back of solar but we've got clients all over the world using it for various different geospatial management needs. But as I said, it's been designed for solar because that's the industry we're in. It's going really well. It's a good way of seeing your solar plant geospatially mapped out. So they're the three businesses with the US as well. Obsessing about market share, energy statistics, because we are trying to work towards net zero. So if we don't understand the mechanics of the numbers, how do we know we're going in the right direction? Build from where you're strong. Think globally, act locally and on this aspect you've got... depending on which metric you use, I know there's about 11 gigawatts of large scale farms. So if you've got 5 gigawatt you're managing in the UK and Ireland or anywhere near that, you're making structural observations with respect to the game theory about scale and seeing the market impact. I've worked on 3 gigawatts of solar farms, probably quoted 10 gigawatts and lost 70%. So the success rate doesn't need to be huge to survive in the industry. We could do a whole series just because you're so hyper hyperactive in the solar business and you have wind as well and you do agriculture. We could just do a whole series on your businesses. But if we try to focus and drill into core areas with Cleve Hill Solar Farm being a 1000 acres, now there's 3000 acres solar farms in development. If you use trackers or fix the acreage changes You can have over 12000 football players on in Cleve Hill Solar Farm to give you idea of scale, know, over 500 football pitches worth. And so the point being, the challenge of like doing module cleaning on a 5 megawatt site or a 1 meg rooftop or 200 kilowatt rooftop is different to doing 5 portrait east-west modules which are 5 meters high at the highest point. And what I've learned on Cleve is, you know, Now you're getting into the realms of proper construction contractors that can move earth, they can install drainage, but where they may benefit from your insights is on the module cleaning front. How do you get at that height? How do you clean modules at height? What considerations do you pay to ensure there's no glass cracking, there's no hot spots? Those are the electrical areas where I feel the civil guys will benefit from your knowledge. Well, ultimately, there are several sites that we've come across around the world that need a system outside of ours. Now, just coming back to the scale of Everblue and our market share and things, and it hasn't been overnight. We've grown this from a for lot of years incrementally. But the whole thing is built on systemising. And it's making sure that you've got replicatable services and that they are just, obviously out on the field, we're never gonna see production line efficiency, but it's based on that principle, making sure that everyone is trained to the same standard, use the same equipment, and it's done over and over and over again. And by doing that, you're making sure that you've got consistent safety, consistent compliance, consistent quality. And that's how we've gained our reputation. It's just doing things consistently over time and then expanding in that way. There's lots of people that try and expand when they have some success as a small business and they fail and it's because they haven't noted down the systems. They don't have a standard training package. They don't have a process for all of the different eventualities that you come across on a solar farm field. So that's what we've tried to achieve and by no means is it perfect. We're still constantly working on systems and in fact we've got a system, we've got a head of systems, someone just looks after those. The reason I'm mentioning that is because sites like Cleve Hill and there are many that we've come across in different countries that have been asked to review. It just involves something that goes away from our standard approach and... we would go into our, if we were invited to do anything on a site like that, and we have been in the past, we would get our R &D team to look, okay, how can we do this? How can we make sure that we're compliant with the warranties, clean effectively, make sure it's safe, and cost effective. mean, that's one of the, safety is a key driver, but cost is a big driver. And... What do you mean by cost? if someone does module cleaning on the cheap and they crack half a million modules, that won't be very cheap. No, that's right, but there is a potential, I think, to... to deliver services on sites like Cleve Hill really cost effectively with the right solution. But the right solution is an engineering project. It's a year. It's hundreds of thousands of pounds investment to get it. But once you've got that tool that's been designed for that, then you could achieve quite cost effective. Module cleaning, as an example. So the solutions out there in companies like Everblue, we're able to deliver them, but it wouldn't be off the shelf. So I think by designing something slightly outside of the norm, you just open yourselves up, any developer will open themselves up to increased costs. the last thing you wanna to do is say, okay, well, the O&M cost as a standard is this for a sofa in the UK, and then go and build Cleve Hill and expect it to be the same, because it's not going to be. I'll go down my own rabbit holes. I've doing solar 14 years full time. I've run into you a couple of times at networking dos which are very well attended. We have our own network of about 156 people now. 20 or 30 of them turn up once a month which is great for... getting market intel, socializing with people. And I asked myself, module cleaning, how's this relevant to cabling? then I'm researching with our teams in Switzerland and also some select contractors and suppliers, you know, what are the DC safety risks in solar? And, you know I was amazed when I did, invested a couple of grand in AI research over the last 12 months. that there's actually been fatalities from module cleaning because it's impossible to isolate modules without covering them with a blanket or some kind of polymer. When the sun's shining, you can have 1,000-1500 volt system which cannot be isolated. So what tools have you developed to ensure people don't come into contact with DC electrocution? I think just, I'll come on to that, but just generally speaking, one of my concerns around a solar farm is that it's not noisy typically. It's not, as human beings, we have certain things that make us alert. It's noise, it's movement. run into a gas turbine or a wind turbine. Exactly. a solar farm has got sheep, know, birds are singing and it feels very safe. And I often see, which really frustrates me, companies posting on LinkedIn with pictures of primary school children or any children visiting the site and they're all lining up and putting their arms along the surface with the modules on a sunny day. And I just think, one, if that was my kid's primary school, that'd be big trouble. No one has anyone tested that to see if there's, I mean, don't do it anyway because of the risk, You'll be safer going in a high voltage substation, which is properly earthed, than putting water on a 1500V system. And if there's insulation failure under the right conditions, you can get a 1500V shock. So all of our health and safety team have ensured that all of our teams are isolated from any possible leakage within our machinery. So that's all been designed in. if there's any, because all of, I'd say 99 point something percent of the module cleaning work we do is from a machine sitting in a cab and you're isolated. we do have to sometimes get out on the teams have got hand poles that they need to finish corners that are inaccessible and things like that. And they're all insulated at 33 kV insulated poles. And there's an absolute ban on touching any part of the solar panel with your hands. You you often see people doing, look at the dirt on the panel. I just wouldn't touch. There's Fortune 500 company with brochures showing people with bare hands touching conductive material. Yeah, you any of those stock image companies. They're all over there, people sitting on them and touching them and pretending to inspect them with children hanging onto them like this. It's just the wrong message, I think. It's the wrong message but also, I only worked at Honeywell for about 9 months. Honeywell is a company that performs very well, ex forces, extremely disciplined. And in those 9 months, I was constantly visiting people that had an incident with safety at height, I had other colleagues in, know, eye wear protection, hearing protection, respiratory issues. most memorable part is the underground and the waterways, they are familiar with invisible risks. If a worker's fainted and you run chase after them without doing gas detection, could be odourless gas underground, which can lead to a fatality. And solar is similar. The risk is even less obvious than going in an underground tunnel because it's a high-voltage system connected to 33 kV transformers or 11 kV. In the case of NSIP projects, 400 kV. And if the earthing design fails for whatever reason, because even well-designed systems can fail, you can have a 33 kV earth potential rise. And these are things I didn't know before. These are things I'm learning. So I think solar has a long way to go to industrialize the attitude towards safety. I think wind is an industry that's been around longer in the UK and it's and also across the world and has unfortunately had a huge number of injuries and fatalities and I think often which is unfortunate the driver for change is when people are injured. Yes. And Wind has got a really highly regulated health and safety, guidance and standards and well regulated. I think solar is much better now than it was when we got into solar operation and maintenance services 11 years ago. But there's still some improvements to make industry wide, in my opinion. My observation of wind is, it's developed by huge companies like RWE, Orsted, Vattenfall. These are almost state led energy companies. Eon, etc. And with solar, it's very CAPEX heavy, low margin during construction, especially for the EPC. And so you can have a lot of companies that haven't got tremendous amounts of experience that relearn the same issues again, which leads to boom and bust crisis. because then we're very good at going legal on people when the site's not performing, but we want the lowest possible module price, lowest EPC price. And because you've got such a huge market share, how do you deal with these quality risks that arise during the O&M stages? What do you mean by O&M Services other than module cleaning that you provide? And what areas could people improve on when they consider developing and designing these sites? Well, from our perspective and looking at efficiency while on site, planning compliance, safety. The layout of a site has a big impact on how efficient things can be. mean, the obvious ones are, and we see it sometimes in the UK, but all of the time in the US, above ground cables. They're efficiency killers when it comes to things where you need to travel around the whole site. You've got to drive in and reverse out of rows, and lot of hand management of, say, vegetation or module cleaning has to be done around these infrastructures. there might be cost savings or reasons why you might use something like an overground cable but it definitely should be balanced with the probably doubling of costs when it comes to the services that we provide. I visited a solar farm in Spain that we were invited to tender for, and if they'd moved an inverter station cabinet two metres, and they had plenty of room, it wasn't a constrained site. from a land perspective, they moved that. They would have been able to clean 150 megawatts with one of our machines, would have been very cost effective. But because they put the inverters slightly in the wrong place, it blocked two rows. So you could only clean one third with our method and the rest would have to be done by hand. And that's 150 megawatts. And because the rows are so long, you couldn't. it would be very difficult to use a robot because you wouldn't be able to get the water to it. So it would be a hand wash. And it's in southern Spain, which means that it's going to need to be cleaned multiple times. the cost, increased costs within the O&M phase across, say, 30, 40 year lifespan of that project is colossal. The question I asked you was a bit unfair because it's quite deep, which is, you know, you've got 5 gigawatt of experience and what could people do differently when they design and develop these sites? And then you said, like in the US, have above ground cabling. which is not great for getting around the site. That's right. Yeah. And then on top of what can people get to do better? Yeah, it's it's it's the promises that developers make and planning to get the planning over the line, which I can understand that you want to get the rubber stamp to say you can build this solar farm. uh there's some pretty onerous biodiversity management plans being consented at the moment, which I don't believe anyone's quantified what the cost of delivering these are. The difference between old sites, say 10-year-old sites, where they had a planning condition that said, this, plant these wildflowers, plant this hedge, or those were planning conditions. And planning conditions, if you don't comply with them, the enforceability of those falls away. But with BNG, you're signing a 106 agreement or... or something similar with the local authority to promise to deliver the what they call BNG credits to deliver at least 10 % biodiversity net gain. Most solar farms are delivering. 200 % biodiversity gain, 250 % biodiversity gain. So those credits they're generating or promising to generate are put in the planning balance. And that's why the local authority have to secure that, the delivery of that legally. So now we're in this position where all solar farms that are consented post BNG adoption, which was two or three years ago. that are now being built today are going to huge costs when it comes to looking after all of these environmental promises they've made. And I think what you can do is consider the operational impact during the planning process to make sure that what you're doing doesn't conflict with the operational site and isn't going to be too costly to actually deliver because it's not like before where if you don't deliver it, it can just be forgotten if no one raises an enforcement issue. That will never fall away because it's a legal agreement that you've sold or signed and if you don't comply with it and someone complains, it's going to be a much bigger problem than has been before. So then that leads to things we're dealing with is that they're tremendously detailed and every area needs deep focus. you know, coming back to the early point about R &D, you why would you spend a million pounds .. developing a new process if the client wouldn't pay for it? So there's always a balance between the commercial element, doing sales and getting the agreements in and then spending the money upfront because the danger always is if you develop something without customer buy in, then if no one adopts what we've developed, it just becomes sunk costs. So a lot of people don't do R &D because of that. so have you thought about re-powering? Because a lot of the early solar farms, the inverters will be coming to end of life. I know also from industry reports, there's tremendous amount of transformer failures in the PV business. Not because people are doing a bad job. It's just the PV load profile is brand new. We're not used to having DC infrastructure. of this scale. These arguments are over a 100 years old between Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison and the AC grid won the arguments and now it turns out we need to keep the HV AC grid but we need to grow the DC grid which we don't have 100 years of industrial knowledge on. So what is your thoughts on repowering? Well, arguably, a solar farm effectively is the electrical side of a solar farm. But that's the part we don't get involved with at the moment. We don't do any electrical maintenance, any testing that's left to the O&Ms or other contractors. So we're delivering the bits around the edge that hopefully are equally as important. Everything's important. If you don't keep clean the modules and the performance drops by 30 % and people are raising funds on 5 % 8 % yields, it just defies logic. This is the long-term market rules we need to establish. Yeah, it's really interesting when it comes to discussing module cleaning as a principle because there's lots of people that say, they're self-cleaning, although there certainly was a message that we were getting a few years ago. then, and it's then looking at how it's perceived in different regions and the US there is much less frequent. In the UK, it's frequent because if you don't do it, you get a hardened dirt along the bottom edge and you get lichen and moss growth. And lichen and moss growing is very difficult to remove and then causes hot spots on the modules and it can cause longer term damage and reduction of longevity. So just keeping the modules fresh like you would keep if you owned anything, you can keep it good condition. so keeping the modules in a good order is the way we do it in the UK and I do think that's the right way of doing it. Hotspots on modules, especially on commercial and industrial projects, that's a huge fire risk. And unlike a solar farm, where if a transformer fails, it might be in the middle of nowhere. There's a fire. You can go deal with it. If it happens on a massive warehouse, some of these warehouses can be several football pitches worth of rooftop space. And if there isn't alarms, there isn't process for monitoring, it could develop into a real life fire. which no one can switch off. You've got modular power electronics which is also developing infant industry. The research I've done over the last three years is I've learned that the PV safety is extremely misunderstood and the reason why I ask you more challenging questions around repowering is because you've written in your notes that you've developed your own solar before. Yes, there's sister company to, well, there's Everblue's group and then there's another company called Genatech. And that was the beginning of my renewable energy ventures. And that's kind of the vehicle we used to develop that wind scheme. And also we've developed a few other small solar farms between... 2MW and 14MW I think is the biggest one we did. And those have all been purchased by other people and now owned and operated by them. And we still have operation maintenance contracts to deliver the services that we provide on those sites, but they're owned and operated by other people. Fantastic, and is there a reason why you stopped developing? Do you still develop solar farms? The last one I did was last year, I think. It was built last year, I believe. Time flies by, isn't it? I think it was built last year. I don't have the resources and time to search for the little pockets of grid and to chase all of the DNAs. to get in all of it. That's too complex for me. We stopped when grid availability became a finite thing. That's the reason. Moving forward do you want to mention about the solar roadmap with the UK task force and also speak about you know your other businesses and where you want to take the direction of your own activities in the next next year or so? Yeah, it was really, it was obviously an honour to be mentioned in the solar roadmap. It's amazing that the people that put that together felt that our story was a story they wanted to tell within that document. Effectively, the message there, if anyone hasn't read it, is that solar delivers more than just a solar farm and solar renewable electricity. It stimulates local economies. And our message was, we built a 3.6MW solar farm on our farm. And from that got the idea of how are the modules going to stay clean because we saw that during construction, they got muddy. And then we developed that. from that, solar farm has come the growth of our business in our small village in the rural area in Norfolk. And I think that could be, well it has been replicated but could be replicated more across the whole country where these remote locations that have renewable energy projects are able to stimulate those thoughts of people and generate, I guess ultimately generate local employment. And as I said before, we employ quite a number of people from North Norfolk and there are relatively limited opportunities for careers there. It's very focused on... tourism, the catering industry, farming and fishing, all of which are a great place to be. But they don't necessarily offer a range of opportunities and I suppose salaries that perhaps other industries might earn. You invest in mental health support services, do want to talk about what that is and how do people benefit from it and who it's for? Yana is a mental health charity. They support rural workers that often work in isolation. Yana supports rural people with mental health issues and it's close to us because all of our staff work in the middle of nowhere. mean, everyone knows most solar farms are located in the middle of a field all over the country and they do work in teams, but they're not necessarily always together, they're doing different things. So I think it can be quite isolated. obviously within Within our company we do the best to support our teams, but within the wider rural world you've got farming and people on solar farms and lots of different industries where people are working alone. So think Yana, we believe, is a really good charity to support and it... It's something that's close to us and we want to make sure that everyone has someone to call if they need it. I don't think, you know, it's not necessarily just for rural people. There's no, you don't call up and say, are you rural? That's where it starts. Well, the irony is now your isolation has become not only because I've been in field sales and sales engineering for most of my adult life. And one of the reasons why I get along with lot of RAF, Navy, Army people is it's not an easy thing if you're always in a family environment, in school, in university, in workplace to spend long hours in isolation on your own. And now with Covid, people working from home more, everyone was in Jacuzzis, not everyone but a lot of you know celebrating, wow I'm working from home. Suddenly they realised two years later they're tremendously lonely and kids that were studying from home told to go back to school because you could you could see the impact on people. There's definitely some anxiety around it. Yeah, absolutely. And it's really important that we interact as humans. It's a really good thing. I think without it, you can struggle. So, YANA is a brilliant charity and obviously encourage everyone to take a look at what they do. yeah, so we support them. I don't judge anyone with mental health. know, surprised as I was driving to Manchester University with my daughter listening to Alex Ferguson's autobiography because he, one of the biggest things he dealt with was loneliness. Because even though I'm Alex Ferguson, Sir Alex, I'm always in company of people, people were so afraid of him, no one would go to his office. So, you you think you know someone and know, Network Rail has a great advert about this, you know, you know, have conversations with people, check in on others. In terms of coming to a conclusion, what do you think is the future of solar photovoltaics and more importantly what kind of people do you want to work with? Good question. So, solar voltaics, the future, I mean, it's obviously an extremely good source of renewable electricity. It's a reliable source and we can predict it. And so I think we will continue to successfully integrate solar within our industries and within our country, within our energy network. Obviously we work in utility scale solar, but don't necessarily think that's the strategy at the moment is the correct one. I do think that there should be a real emphasis on self delivery, whether that's a business or your own home. I think there's a lot of infrastructure costs that come with maintaining and balancing a grid. if you generate it locally, whether that's a private wire system on a housing site or whether that's your own solar on your roof or in your garden, I really think that's the first step. Everyone should be looking at how they can deliver their own power. they should, I know there are incentives for people to do that, but I think it perhaps should be publicised a bit more and incentivised a bit more. I think it comes with a caveat of making sure these things stay maintained because there is... there is a risk that you invest in something that someone sold you as this amazing setup with a battery, but then there's no maintenance that falls away and then you're then reliant on the grid again. there's a little bit about maintenance. I think that straddles all of solar for me. As we move forward into the future is making sure that it's maintained correctly. On a private or commercial basis or a utility scale basis. I don't think the maintenance has been nailed yet. And therefore, we've got to get that right before we start calling it national infrastructure. Within the context of what's happening within the world, solar is a brilliant opportunity for the UK to be more self-sufficient. And we should be doing that. But should we be blindly building hundreds of solar farms without looking at pushing more localised generation, more private wire projects? I don't know. I'm not sure whether we've got the mix right right now. But I certainly think it has an exciting future in this country. A lot to think about there. My personal view is, know, I share a similar career journey to yourself, which is I started my business to focus on onshore wind and it pretty much got banned and offshore wind favours larger companies, so it's difficult to get involved with that unless you have a yacht, not a yacht, but massive sea wind turbine laying vessel or even for the cables you need subsea cable laying vessels. So I go into solar not to be green, but just because I needed work. You know, so I'm actually focused on the business end of things. And I think anything done badly goes wrong, whether you're building a house or a data center or so. It's a power plant at end of the day. And if people don't pay attention to longevity because pension funds are investing they want 25 year, 40 year returns. If the site is failing within year 2 or 3 and there's not a budget for O&M, there's going to be an issue. And I think whatever people think, rightly or wrongly, the Brexit referendum was very divisive and the industry sort of fell off a cliff edge in 2017. But we are a small country in the, every country is a small country in the general scheme of the world. But we're not the largest country in the world. And solar's now, you know, I'm amazed. The reason why I've stuck at it for 14 years and expect to spend my career in solar is because I'm amazed as to the potential. There's 3 terawatts of solar installed worldwide. 1 terawatt of that, over 1 terawatt of that is in China. know, there's countries like Netherlands, which are smaller than the UK, have overtaken us. Spain, you can understand, they've got more sunshine. Italy, you can understand. Germany, you know, it's not a lot warmer than ours as a climate, has over 100 gigawatts of solar. So the world has moved on very rapidly. And unfortunately now, because of more geopolitical tensions, the Ukraine, with America, with Iran. Now we've got a situation where the UK is becoming stable again. whatever we do, we have to find a way of establishing market standards, otherwise it's going to fail. And I don't think we can necessarily, it isn't a criticism from my perspective of the way things are now. It's a really fast growing industry and it's very new. And you've gone from pretty much zero to however many terawatts you said globally at second. 3 terawatts. 3 terawatts. And that's been in a small amount of years. And it's not just about the deployment of that and the management of it. It's about the technology that's changed. If you look at the technology 15 years ago. it's evolved. all of that has happened in a short space of time. There's always going to be, excuse me, when that happens, there's always going to be problems. no one should be, I'm not criticising anyone by saying things aren't right now. It's just the nature of fast expansion in industry. I go back to your question earlier about who you want to work with. I think we just need to make sure that everyone, I want to work with are people that can see that. They can sit down and reflect on what they've done or what the industry has done or their colleagues have done and say, okay, well, we didn't get it right. Let's hold our hands up. But we are a growing industry and we're all learning every day. We're learning really fast every day, actually. And how do we fix it as opposed to blindly just pushing forward and not... not reflecting on things that were not done correctly or were done correctly. I think it's really important that we have constant self-reflection within this growing industry. And I think the people that are willing to do that are the ones we want to work with. Absolutely. And as we come towards the end of our podcast, thank you for your time. you know, you have a meeting at one o'clock. You know, it's not been easy to do this podcast because we are in the middle of London in Bloomsbury. There's like horns going off, police cars, people interuptting. I think you've done a fantastic job. It shows nerves of steel to carry on and then to retain your train of thought. But coming back to the actuarial science of solar, which I've been trying to learn, it's an area my son has an interest in. uh I try to stay relevant in my kids lives as they become teenagers and try to talk to me less and less. What I'm amazed by is, and those that are lucky enough to invest in solar in retirement and those that are young enough to still work in the industry. And I think where I've got things in common with yourself is you've been involved in solar from a very young age. You still have a couple of decades ahead of you at least, touch wood, hopefully, even more. in our lifetimes, according to Shell Sky Scenario and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the US, solar has a pipeline of 75 terawatts in the next 20, 30 years. So there's 3 terawatts installed and there's probably 72 terawatts more ahead of us. And that is an economic reality that's already modeled. So if you put that into perspective, The oil and gas industry may have started out, and if it's true, 100 % of my feeling is may have started because of the two world wars. And it wasn't very easy. there's movies like There Will Be Blood. The oil and gas industry was also a cowboy industry in the beginning, driven by necessity. And they've stabilized themselves over. the Industrial Revolution onwards. And solar is at that growing pain stage, with this opportunism, there's compliance concerns, there's hubris and overconfidence. know, the proud fall harder than the weak. You know, if you go build a million solar panels without a design, we're going to have problems. And people want then want to sue us for the risk that comes with that. So, you know, but all of that just tells me there's a lot of exciting work to do. And you want to be where there is difference to be made because if we go into construction, people know how to build tall buildings. We can't teach them to do it better. I think the exciting thing is, well the opportunity is exciting for anyone that has knowledge and in the experience that perhaps a lot of people in the UK have to help the world meet that 70 something terawatt demand 75 terawatts by 2050 if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of opportunity for people that have knowledge and experience. But I think the fundamental thing that we need to do is make sure that we turn the knowledge of those people into a systemised approach. Make sure, because one person can go into a company or into a region and have an influence. But if you create... training packages, you create systems, businesses that are replicatable that can then support the globe as it develops 70-something terawatts. That's what's needed. It will never be possible to deliver that unless we have a system to do it. And how we price the risk as we come towards the end and I'll let you go to the next meeting. How we price the risk is also an art form in itself. if modules are 10 cents a watt, they used to be 55 cents a watt during MIP. EPC is now around 42, 50 cents a watt or pence a watt. Currency exchange is a thing as well. And operating solar assets, some of them are incentive linked are trading at £1.35 a watt. So that gap, if you round up to 50 per watt for EPC, including modules, the structure. and you know I don't even know what the O&M budget is. If you double that, that's still below 35 pence below the trading values of solar. So the gap in between is the delivery risk that people don't want to take on. So if you can find a mechanism of de-risking those things, there is a hell of a lot of margin to be made. But because there's so much capex... There is going to be constant boom and bust cycle, but I can't think of another industry more exciting than solar. Maybe energy storage, battery storage comes close, even more exciting is the grid for me. Yeah, no, very exciting place to be. Myself and all of the team that we work with and all of our clients, we're all really excited about growing our businesses and continuing to deliver good quality services into the future. it's exciting stuff. Thanks for your time today and I'm going to switch off now to let you focus on your one o'clock call which is in about three minutes and then we can carry on talking about your other businesses which we haven't even spoken about over lunch if you have time. Cheers.