Feeling the heat: Preparing Europe's grids for summer

Europe's power systems are facing a new reality.

As heatwaves become more frequent and intense, electricity networks are coming under growing pressure. Rising cooling demand, aging infrastructure and the rapid expansion of renewable energy are all changing how grids operate during periods of extreme weather.

The recent Iberian blackout also highlighted how important resilience, flexibility and interconnection have become in maintaining system security.

So is Europe's electricity system ready for a hotter future?

In this episode of Plugged In, Richard speaks with Julia Demirdag, Germany Correspondent at Montel News, Guy Nicholson from Statkraft, and Paweł Czyżak from Ember about how heatwaves are reshaping Europe's power sector.

Together they explore why grids are increasingly becoming the critical point of vulnerability, what lessons can be learned from the Iberian blackout, and how batteries, storage and smarter system design could help future-proof Europe's electricity networks.

#PluggedInPodcast #MontelNews #EnergyTransition #PowerMarkets #GridResilience #Heatwaves #EnergySecurity #BatteryStorage #ElectricityMarkets #Renewables #EnergyPolicy #NetZero

Host: Richard Sverrisson – Editor-in-Chief, Montel News

Guests:
Julia Demirdag – Germany Correspondent, Montel News
Guy Nicholson – Head of Zero Carbon Grid Solutions, Statkraft
Dr Paweł Czyżak – Europe Programme Director, Ember

Editor: Alexandra Carlon

Producer: Alexandra Carlon

Transcript

Heat Waves Put Grids Under Strain

0:05

Hello listeners and welcome to Plugged In, the Energy News podcast from Montel, where we bring the latest news, issues and changes happening in the energy sector. It's only early June, yet Europe is once again sweltering under extreme temperatures. From record-breaking heat waves to growing concerns about grid reliability, the pressure on Europe's electricity systems is becoming impossible to ignore. As transmission networks operate closer to their limits and the energy transition accelerates, are Europe's power systems prepared for a future where extreme weather becomes the norm rather than the exception? Last year's blackout across the Iberian Peninsula brought energy security and system resilience sharply into focus. There is growing debate about grid investment, flexibility, reliability, and whether Europe's infrastructure is keeping pace with a rapid transformation of its power sector. So, what happens to an electricity system when temperatures soar? Are grids becoming the weakest link in the energy transition? And what investments are needed to ensure Europe can keep the lights on in a hotter and more electrified future?

Why The Grid Feels Less Predictable

1:19

Setting the scene for us today is Julia Demudag, our Germany correspondent based in Frankfurt. A warm welcome to you, Julia. Hello. So, Julia, Europe has experienced several major heat waves in recent years. Are electricity systems now facing a fundamentally different operating environment than they were a decade ago? Yes, uh definitely, I would say so. A decade ago, running a grid was a relatively predictable business. And today it's a more like a high-stakes balancing act, basically, because we have several factors that have changed over the past years. One is obviously the uh build-out of renewable power, especially solar, which in the summer is flooding the grid during midday and then is flooding out of the grid in the evenings. So we now see maybe during one hour, we see 10 gigawatts of a po drop in power generation, which 10 years ago would have been maybe equivalent to uh 10 nuclear plants leaving the grid within one hour, which uh would have been unimaginable almost. And so that's obviously a big difference. If you look uh 10 years ago, we've seen a lot more Arctic ice, and this is obviously now smelting with uh climate change. So we are currently near a record low. And the Arctic ice is something that has provided cooling for Europe, but right now Europe is the continent that heats up fastest with climate change. So we see more heat waves, they're more pronounced, and they last longer. So yeah, we see just more heat than a decade ago. And yeah, also drier, drier weather. Yeah, and that's obviously it increases the demand for air conditioning in certain markets. So um what but when people think about extreme weather and energy, they often focus on uh power production or generation, uh Julia. But but why are grids and transmission networks increasingly becoming the critical point of vulnerability? Yes, I would say the main point is that uh wind and solar power has been expanding massively over the past year. And that's something a solar plant is something that can be built really, really fast. So, say, I don't know, a few months maybe. While a grid takes decades to build and to build out. So they're just not keeping pace with the expansion of renewables. So it's like we've built all the cars, but we forgot to build the highways that they can use. Yeah. Julian, thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you.

Heat Stress From Wires To Power Plants

3:56

As renewable generation expands and extreme weather becomes more frequent, keeping the grid stable is becoming just as important as generating enough electricity. So what does that mean in practice? I'm joined by Guy Nicholson, head of Zero Carbon Grid Solutions at Startcraft. Guy, a warm welcome to Plugged in. Thanks, Richard. Great to be here. Great to have you on board. So I mean I think we're here to talk about heat waves, blackouts, and and grid resilience. Now, they're often discussed as a challenge for grid operators, but from your perspective, how do periods of extreme heat affect the wider electricity system and marketing more in general? Yeah, so I think it probably comes down to the laws of physics. You know, heat creates warmer temperatures, things have greater resistance at higher temperatures, and with the old Ohm's law, I squared R, you know, we got uh more resistance means more heat, so you can get into a vicious circle. So w how does that play out really in terms of practicalities? It means that terms of high temperatures, you're gonna have more forced outages of plants, and therefore grid operators would probably, you know, move away from move to a more secure system, perhaps restrict outages that might be needed to connect a new generation and new projects, new data centres, grid reinforcements and all that. So it sort of restricts the landscape, if you like, for new connections and grid developments by having to effectively operate the grid to be resilient to these forced outages of plants in these high temperature conditions. So it's a kind of double whammy on top of what we're trying to do, just makes what we're trying to do even harder. Yeah. And get and to get to the net zero, absolutely. So uh what kind of infrastructure is largely affected by this extreme heat? I mean, you meant obviously grids, but what what kind of power plants and what kind of production or generation units? Yeah, so I forgot if you go to the power plant side, then you know, you've got things like, well, remembering the you know last heat wave in France where lots of the nuclear were switched off because the cooling water's too hot, they're having to break environmental laws to discharge hot cooling water into rivers and lakes, you know, with impacts on wildlife. So uh and eventually turn plants off. So then that restricts the amount of plant available, and again that creates additional stresses and so on on the uh uh on the system. And then fossil plants as well, you know, higher temperatures become less efficient through thermo thermodynamics, so it's it's it's uh compounding the the challenge of of uh high temperatures. I think you know the other thing people will say is, well, yeah, solar is less efficient at high temperatures as well, but then we have more solar available, so that's countered to a degree. And uh obviously air conditioning demand is going up with higher temperatures, but we've also got more solar, and particularly more embedded solar and distributed solar that that helps to counter that and reduce the load on grids. So you know the renewables are definitely helping resolve this situation in in many ways, and and that uh solar air conditioning, cooling match is is is very helpful in that regard. But what about wind, for example? When there's times of extreme heat, it's often not very windy. I mean that that's a sense anyway, it's all quite sticky or muggy or very, very dry and hot. I know that the Germans have introduced this word into the English language called Dunkelflaute, but you also you have this thing called Hitzeflaute as well. So when you know when when there's very little wind when it's very hot. Is that a a fair new addition to the English language, guy? I'll I'll take it away and uh thanks for introducing me to Hitzenflauter, uh Richard. Uh obviously dunkelflauter, as you say, is well embedded now and uh you know a useful term. But uh, you know, I think uh at the end of the day, the the point of renewables is to displace fossil fuels from the day-to-day generation mix. It's not necessarily to get all fossil fuel plants shut down. So, you know, we will still need fossil fuel plants there for the dunkelflauter, so they can still operate in the Hitsflauter, if I got that right. Probably didn't. Um But uh yeah, so you know the the fossil fuel plant is there, just means we have to run it more, which is not a good thing. But you know, the mission for renewables is actually getting fossils off the grid most of the time. You know, getting to the zero carbon operation of the grid. And if we have to run fossil fuels occasionally when there's a dung flouter or otherwise, that's not a big issue. The big issue is getting the fossils off the grid by having lots of renewables there and a you know, a good stable grid to run with those renewables to allow them to to operate. And that's I think the should be the the key focus at the moment. For sure. You you mentioned

Demand Shifts As Cooling Takes Off

8:53

cooling demand, and that's that that's sort of growing, the demand for air conditioning as these as we enter these these very sort of periods of of extreme weather or extreme heat. Are we seeing a fundamental shift in in electricity consumption patterns? And what does that then mean for system planning? Yeah, if I go back to working on first wind projects in South Australia in around 2000, and South Australia at the end of the 90s was transmissioning transitioning from a winter-dominated peak demand to a summer-dominated peak demand, and that happened very quickly as people got air conditioning and so on, driven by the availability and climate change, and we're gonna see that happen more widely. But again, with solar matching very well with that, I don't see that as any big issue. I think you know we have seen demand flatten and even fall in you know mature grids in in Europe and the US, and that has been down to a lot down to energy efficiency, you know, things like uh LED light bulbs. We used to use 10% of our GB electricity on lighting, you know, and that's just smashed to bits by LE. So the whole efficiency process has has helped reduce demand. We are going to see demand go up as we get electrification of vehicles, electrification of heat. So you know that that dip in in electricity consumption is is kind of starting to reverse. Plus, yeah, all the talk about AI data centres as well, so driving driving up demand. So we are seeing a a rise in demand from from now on, is how I how I look at it. I mean, uh, if we go back to these kind of periods of extreme heat as well, I think they used to sort of happen every three years. Or I'm uh sort of going going back, uh, you know, I've been in this market a while, so not quite 2000, but 2003, 2006 were were key area, then then also uh a few years ago. But it seems to be hap-happening every year now, or or certainly on an annual basis, but also earlier in the year. So we've had this extreme this period now in May rather than uh than in July and August. Is this is are there different patterns emerging here, Guy? I don't know if you've modelled this or looked at this in any way. Not my fault, I have to say, in terms of you know what is the trend in this area. So ask someone else on that. I think my focus is really on how we deal with it wherever it happens, whenever it happens. And you know, there's always something different and new happening with demand, with generation, with the weather, whatever it is, with cybersecurity, there's always changes, always threats, there's always new challenges. And I think my focus really is how do we build, operate, and run a grid that is resilient to whatever gets thrown at it from all these different aspects rather than focusing on is one pattern. Absolutely, fair fair enough. I just sort of um just uh jumped into my mind for whatever

Batteries And Flexibility Keep Balance

11:49

reason. But uh if we look at you know system resiliency and uh, you know, I think flexibility is often described as one of the key tools for for managing, you know, electric system stress. How can batteries, demand response, and other flexible resources help maintain that reliability and that resilience during these periods of of extreme weather? Yeah, so I think you know there's that what I might call adequacy of the system. So, you know, do we have enough generation to meet demand? Do we have enough network to get the generation to where it's needed? And I note that NCOE have sort of called out a couple of island systems in in in Europe in their summer outlook this year to sort of say resilience, adequacy issues. And you know, where you've got a uh an island with limited interconnection, like the island of Ireland, you know, if you have a lot of outages of plants, if you have high demand because of air conditioning load, I don't think it's quite got there in Ireland yet, but it will do. Then, you know, do you have enough plant interconnectors and so on to deliver that? And and things like batteries come in enormously to that, providing that that lump of energy. And we've seen the battery durations that we deal with. When we put our first battery systems in ten years ago, we were talking about half-hour battery and it was focused entirely on frequency response. And we've now seen uh in our recent batteries four hours duration. We're looking at long duration energy storage with eight hours and more duration. So that you know, lowering cost of batteries has enabled us to put in larger and larger duration systems, and they can have a massive impact, you know, not just on a a sort of an event where there's a sudden loss of demand, a loss of an interconnector, a trip of a big power station, and batteries can easily jump in and fill the gap, but also with the evening peaks and so on, or even a a longer period of of high demand or yeah, uh a loss of loss of particular generation sources for for particular times, or you know, the reduction in efficiency of of um fossil plant during hot weather, for example. So, you know, the that uh storage is is transformational, making a a massive impact on on grids uh worldwide, some ahead of others obviously, but everybody's uh moving in the same direction on this uh stuff. I think uh the other thing is with uh what I call stability uh and and if you like what what happened in Spain, we had an instable grid with from a voltage instability point of view in Spain, then you know that's that's a kind of lack of uh ability to to manage voltage. We can have similar things with inertia and uh so on. So having uh equipment in the grid to provide services to manage these uh new challenges, there's it's really uh a great opportunity. The technology's there, it's just about deploying it and getting it in place. And you know, StatCraft were putting in batteries for w which provide things like frequency response, you know, moving into things like inertial response from batteries. We've already got synchronous compensators which provide excellent voltage stability, inertia, system strength, fault current, things like that. So all these services that have traditionally been supplied by fossil fuel generators, when those fossil fuel generators aren't on the grid, they can't supply the services. Or so so we can provide those services with these new technologies or new embodiments, if you like, of of existing technologies or new refinements that enable us to run a grid with uh 100% renewables without any fossil fuels running. So that's the that's once we can do that, we can be also resilient to a lot of stuff that the weather can throw at us or cybersecurity can throw at us or or whatever. So you mention eight-hour batteries or even larger ones, are they already commercially viable? I would say not generally commercially viable in in the markets I'm in. There may be some markets where they are. But uh you know, it's coming. And um you know in in UK we've got the long-duration energy storage scheme, a cap and floor scheme to support that kind of duration, be it batteries or or uh pump storage as well, new pump storage projects as well. So envisaging that world where we you need more of that longer term storage to help us out with the the surplus renewables that we're gonna have on the grid. So uh and rather than throw it away, can we put it into storage and then use it later in in when it's needed? Absolutely. These are valuable electrons and are generated or green electrons even so we don't want to waste them. That's that's very important. But guy, you know, where do you think the biggest gaps remain when it comes to building a more resilient power system? Yeah, so I think it's it's about speed of delivering these you know, grid services, ancillary services, system services, people call them different things. We which don't need the the you know therefore we don't need gas or coal or whatever to deliver them. And you know, if we go back to COVID then in GB, uh they could call you know one afternoon in in in spring where we had lots of wind, lots of solar, very low demand because COVID shut down, and the market said we don't want to run any fossil fuels. And the system operator said, Hang on a minute, guys, let's just stop there. We can't run the system stably without all these fossil generators, not because of the energy, but because of the voltage control, because of the frequency control, because of the inertia, because of the fault current or short circuit current. And so they switched off a load of renewables and turned on 17 gasified power stations. So we were in a position to run a zero carbon grid, but we couldn't do it because of the ancillary services, the system services. And we still, you know, Nisso, the GB system operate, has this target to operate a zero carbon grid for the first half hour or hour. It still hasn't quite got there because we're too slow in delivering these new services and these new technologies. And part of that challenge of that is actually just getting access to the grid. So the grid is so congestured in congested in terms of outage planning, you know, we need to take switch things off to connect new stuff up to reinforce the grid. We want to keep an intact grid to maximise the flows of renewables and so on that we've got. So all these tensions work out that it does become challenging to actually connect new stuff to to uh enable these uh zero carbon operations to happen. But yeah, we've got very close this year. We haven't quite got there yet, but I'm sure we will. And then from you know the initial hour, once you've cracked that, you just do more of the same. So it's it's getting that first hour of zero carbon operation on the grid. And and uh very much like happened with coal, you know, you've got a first coal-free hour, the coal-free afternoon, coal-free day, coal-free weekend. And it'll just grow and grow, grow like that, so that we can operate our grids without any fossil fuels for yeah, 90% of the time. That's the ambition, anyway. That's gonna be the that's a sort of one-hour sweet spot. Once you hit that, then you know. Oh, big celebration. Yeah, I'll begin. Yes, the beers out, yeah, for that. Yeah, that'll be great. Fantastic, guy. Thank you very much for being a guest on the Pluggedin' podcast. Thanks, Richard. Been a pleasure. While technologies such as batteries and flexibility services are helping to make power systems more resilient, the bigger question is whether Europe's grids and policies are keeping pace with the challenges ahead.

What Spain’s Blackout Taught Europe

19:48

To explore that, I'm joined by Pavel Chizak, Europe Programme Director at Ember. Great to have you on the show again, Pavel. Hi, Richard. Looking across Europe, how vulnerable are electricity systems becoming to increasingly frequent and intense heat waves? It's becoming more and more vulnerable because they do happen more often. And they are also happening earlier in the year. So we just had a heat wave, what, a week, two weeks ago? That was a bit unexpected because it was still May, so so it used to be more in the summer months. And it's definitely a theme over the summer, and it's definitely repeating itself in terms of the impact on the power system. So increasing prices, problems with balancing, problems with cooling the thermal plants. It's a thing that will keep happening every year, basically, from from now on. Do you I mean you're based i in Poland, Paul, and and and Poland is quite reliant on fossil fuels, especially coal. How is in terms of the waterways, the rivers in Poland, how are they being heated impacted by these kind of heat waves? And for example, the Vistula a few weeks a few months a few years ago the levels dropped very, very low, right? Yes. Poland, like like a few other countries, has this problem of heat cooling the thermal plants with water. So if the water is too hot in the river, it basically can't be used for cooling the thermal plants, so they have to ramp down. And that keeps happening in in Poland, in France, and Germany, and it happens to nuclear plants, to coal plants mostly. There are there are some remedies, but but that's one thing. The other problem is just drought. So that on the other side of the spectrum, we have the hydro fleet, still a big part of Europe's power system, and we consistently see low production from from hydropower plants due to droughts pretty much every year as well. Absolutely. And I think you know, sometimes when we talk about blackouts. Outsource system stresses specifically for grids and transmission and distribution networks, renewable energy seems to take some of the blame. Is that a fair assessment or does it overlook sort of deeper issues within the power system across Europe? I don't think that's a fair assessment. And in fact, in the last heat wave last year, it was mostly solar solar energy that saved us from trouble because the nuclear fleet in France had to ramp down so much that it was pretty much only solar that that kept producing power during the hot days. So I wouldn't say that they are to blame. There's many things in the European power sector that just or system that just are quite old. So the grids are quite old. The the centralized power plants, even the we keep mentioning the French nuclear fleet, you know, that's 40 years old, right? So a lot of that equipment just is aging, and that that means also the grid infrastructure, so the lines, the substations, the transformers. And that also means that they are impacted by the heat. So if you have very high temperatures, the basically the lines can't carry that much power. And and they are more prone to failure, and they are they just had have lower say you can only flow less less power through them. So the solar system becomes more congested and generally more stressed. So it's not so much, if I understand you correctly, Pavel, that it's not so much that solar and essentially wind, their input or their feed into the grid is a problem. It's also the grid itself, that that's not that's not actually fit for purpose in a sort of modern 21st century power system. Would that be a way of looking at it? Yes. Well that there are challenges, of course, in balancing and integrating wind and solar into the grid. So that that's why we need more storage, for example, and then that's why we keep building more storage. But what I'm also saying is that just the grid is old. So regardless of the power mix and the generation side, we have these 40-50-year components that that are just aging. I think I I recently read about Transformers in the UK. I think the average age is like 57 years old or something like that. So that's just that's just a system that was built in in a previous era. Aging infrastructure built for exactly these sort of very this very centralized power system with with big blocks of generation, absolutely. But what what do you think the Iberian blackouts revealed about European electricity networks? And and you think are there are there lessons that apply beyond Portugal and Spain, Babo? Definitely. One lesson is that if you lack interconnection, it's much more difficult to handle any types of disruptions or disturbances even. So the Iberian blackout, uh a lot of it is because the the peninsula is separated from the rest of the power market in Europe, because there's just not enough interconnection capacity with with the neighbors. So normally, if you had a similar situation like that in, say, Germany, a disturbance in frequency, maybe a few power plants coming offline, that would all be buffered by the wider system. So you would have some more imports from France, more imports from Poland, from Denmark, and it would all level out. In Spain and Portugal, it's different because they don't have that much connection with the neighbors for those buffers. So I think lesson one is you need the interconnection. And then lesson two is there were a few maybe inefficient solutions in terms of market design and power balancing that are actually being fixed and were addressed very quickly by the government. So the they came up with the with the whole package of solutions incentivizing storage, for example, or unlocking unlocking the the participation of renewables in voltage control. That was one of the issues there as well. So I think the Spanish government is doing quite a lot to learn from that and apply the lessons very quickly. And these, of course, apply to other countries as well. Like this isn't something that is only possible in Spain. It might as well happen in any other European country. And I think that's very clear, you know, the lessons learnt, you know, inertia, f frequency, and voltage control are absolutely key issues here, aren't they, in terms of keeping that system security. But you don't see the same kind of issues that affected the the Iberian Peninsula or the blackout that originated in Spain, as far as we know, affecting other parts of Europe, certainly like in in in your part of the world or Central West Europe, Central East Europe? I would say there's a lot of change happening in the European power system that is very interesting to watch and that might result in maybe trouble at some point. And that mean what what I mean by that is, for example, in France, again just last week, very high solar curtailment that is quite happens quite quickly. Then the very inflexible and old fleet of nuclear plants that always has trouble during heat waves, goes offline, has a lot of outages. So a com combination of those dynamics without the storage that we need, you know, that's potentially trouble.

Sabotage Risks And Harder Restarts

27:53

Um then we have the second the second big risk that is maybe a bit not not prominent enough sometimes in analysis is outside sabotage or interventions or disruptions. The types of situations that we saw in Estonia, for example, in Moldova, where the link between Finland and Estonia got disrupted by by a Shadow Fleet vessel, and you know that cut off basically around half of Estonia's power demand in an instant. Those types of situations, or sabotages in Berlin twice recently. You know, that that uh that type of thing, cyber attacks, those types of s things are very, very difficult to predict, but they keep happening, and I would assume they will keep happening, and we we need also mechanisms to protect our against those types of threats. What kind of mechanisms are you thinking here, Pavel? I would split them into two, so one is the or maybe more, but one is the say prevention, and for example, I I will mention storage again. If you have more storage, then you can buffer a bit more. So you can if it's if if someone takes a power plant offline, then you have this buffer of power stored in batteries or or pump storage plants, or even demand response units that helps you sort of survive the disruption in the short term. Then you have maybe grid resilience, grid protection, so all of the stuff that just makes attacks more difficult. That's can be maybe monitoring or CCTVs in substations, or it can be Denmark is, for example, testing drone drone ships that would you know monitor the sub-sea infrastructure, sub-sea cables, all of that. And then you have the recovery. I think that's again something that's missed often. But in Spain we saw that the recovery of the system was actually quite difficult. And once it's down, you need specific types of power plants to basically put it back up. And those were hydro plants and interconnectors in the case of Spain. So power from France and Morocco plus a few hydro plants. But if some of them failed actually. So so restoring such a system is not that easy, and and you can again do it with different measures, but we're not very well prepared to actually do that because it doesn't happen often. There's pilot projects, there's projects that that would use again grid forming inverters, solar with batteries to try to do that. You have options like gas and hydro, you have the interconnectors, but we don't test often for that, and we don't really not done it often really in history. So those types of scenarios I think we need to plan for and we need to prepare for. I think those are very important points. I think the recovery and the prevention are two very different very, very important factors, Pavel. What I'm also interested in a little bit is is you know, you often you get you know the focus on renewable intermittency, and that's very hard for for backup once once the system goes down or whatever. But but it it it's not quite that straightforward with gas-fired plants either, is it? They don't they it's not just plug and play. I mean, sometimes they will start up and fail, start up fail again. I mean, hydro is more stable in that sense, is it not? Yes, definitely. That's again, even even in Spain we saw exactly that. They do have some gas plants, but uh the whole system was restarted with with hydro units, uh, I think uh around seven of them. So and quite a few of these uh energy islands or power islands, how how you call them, they they just failed. So the frequency kind of um because they start up a generator, then you you know you start connecting loads, and then it might turn out that the generator can't keep up and it just goes down again. So yeah, it's a tricky process. And the more redundancy you have, of course, the the the safer you can be. Absolutely. Uh a final question for you, Pavel. So as Europe continues to electrify and decarbonize, you can argue whether it's going too slowly or too quickly. But what should policymakers prioritize to ensure the power system remains both clean and resilient? That's a tricky question, because it's definitely not one thing. But I would double down on storage at the moment because we've managed to deploy quite a lot of solar, especially. And there's a long pipeline of project in storage in a few countries, but they need to be built, they need to be connected, they need to be, you know, go through permitting quickly. So I would absolutely focus on that because there's two benefits, or maybe more actually, but you improve the balancing situation, you improve the grid resilience, the recovery as well, and then you also improve the business case for solar even more. The more storage you have, the you know, the flat the prices are sort of smoother, or there's less negative price hours and all of that. So that just kind of boosts solar deployment as well. So that would be my top one priority. And then you have a long, long list of, of course, market measures, grid measures, flexibility measures as well that need to go together with, of course, renewables and the storage. But but I think for now, we're we're definitely lagging behind on on batteries. So that's what I would focus on. Yep, that's a very important point. But I think but isn't it also the fact that with batteries, it's not just the magic bullet. I mean, you need to locate them in the right place, you need to have them starting up, but that's at at the right moment. It's not just a battery is the answer to all of our problems with the electricity system. Or is it? I don't know. Well, of course, of course. I think the biggest point is maybe the the what you mentioned about managing them. So that's that's still not fully maybe regulated and handled in all countries. So a lot of the storage comes as even household plug-in units, and they don't necessarily talk to the grid operators, right? They're say dumb units, they just store and discharge, but what you really need is some type of control over that so you can manage it. The same actually with solar. So that's work in progress and in in quite a few countries still. But in a way, they're quite simple devices, so I don't think you know it's a matter of standards, maybe uh software systems, but it's not rocket science, definitely. So it's much easier than building a grid, let's be honest. So I think for now, measures like that, plus measures on the demand side, like you know, octopus energy in the UK, uh schemes where people just shift their demand a little bit uh within the day, that that makes a big difference for for the grid. Is if it's a million people or five million people, you know, stopping their kettles, that's quite a few gigawatts that we can shed off the load in in stress moments. So solutions like that are pretty simple. They just require maybe a bit of coordination, a bit of regulation, but it's not technically complicated. I mean that that's exactly where guys like you come in, Pavel, is to make the system more intelligent, more smarter, to move away the dumb kind of systems that we we we don't really want or are not going to be that helpful going forward. But thank you very much, Pavel, for being a guest on the Plugged In Podcast. Thanks so much.

Ratings, Reviews And More Reading

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