Pivoting with Purpose: BESS, Emerging Markets and Entrepreneurship
In this episode, Adam sits down with Ville Kaituri, Founder of Olana Energy, an independent power producer based in Finland that’s doubling down on battery energy storage (BESS) across Eastern Europe.
Ville shares the story behind Olana Energy’s rapid pivot from solar to storage, explaining how a crash in the Finnish real estate market and a curiosity about market volatility led him to rethink how energy infrastructure should be built – and who should build it. He dives into Olana Energy’s unique people-first approach to growth, prioritising entrepreneurial local talent over project pipelines, and why that mindset is key to scaling at speed across fragmented, high-opportunity energy markets like Poland and the Baltics.
The conversation touches on everything from navigating grid chaos and regulatory red tape, to the role of storytelling, decision-making agility, and why traditional infrastructure investment models aren’t built for today’s energy volatility. Ville also opens up about rebranding the company, how to optimise BESS performance with real-time analytics, and what he looks for in capital partners with the guts to move fast.
Whether you’re a developer, investor, or just interested in how new energy businesses are being built from the ground up, this episode offers an honest, energising look at the entrepreneurial side of the energy transition.
Adam and Ville cover:
- Why the team pivoted from solar to BESS - and how they’re scaling fast across Poland and the Baltics
- The risks of project-first thinking and why finding the right people comes first
- How fast decisions, flat structures, and founder storytelling fuel infrastructure growth
- Why owning BESS knowledge in-house beats outsourcing in a still-nascent market
- What emerging markets reveal about grid visibility, investment barriers, and regulatory reform
The Hypercube podcast sits down with leaders in the energy and utilities sectors to explore how data analytics can help businesses make smarter decisions and accelerate business growth.
CHAPTER MARKERS
Chapter markers
[00:00] Introducing Ville Kaituri – Founder mindset and why people come first
[02:18] Building energy projects in Eastern Europe – Risk, regulation, and reality
[05:05] From solar to storage – The pivot to BESS and the story behind the rebrand
[09:14] Scaling BESS fast – Why people, not projects, are the starting point
[13:10] In-house expertise vs. consultants – Taking full ownership of delivery
[16:35] Decision-making speed – Why agility is a competitive advantage
[21:02] Grid constraints and connection chaos – Lessons from Poland and the Baltics
[26:23] The mismatch between BESS and traditional infra investment models
[30:20] Using data to monitor battery health and optimise performance
[34:07] Regulation, visibility, and what policymakers need to fix next
TRANSCRIPT
Hypercube Podcast Transcript
Title: Pivoting with Purpose: BESS, Emerging Markets and Entrepreneurship
Host: Adam Sroka
Guests: Ville Kaituri
Ville Kaituri (00:02)
I’m a big people person and
stemming from that has sort of started the idea that, okay, let’s start with the people. Everybody in the business starts with the projects. But there’s like a tonne of projects. There’s good ones, there are bad ones. First, find the people. Try to identify like really unique, curious, bold, entrepreneurial type people.
And enable them to do their
Adam Sroka (00:44)
Hello and welcome back to the Hypercube podcast. I am delighted today to be joined by Ville Kaituri from Olana Energy. Ville, could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself for the audience?
Ville Kaituri (00:57)
Yes,
as you mentioned, Ville Kaituri, Finnish, a 35 year old entrepreneur. Personally I’ve built 4 companies so far, could be called a serial entrepreneur, although I hate the term. It gives an indication of repeating failures. Olana Energy is energy storage
IPP, independent power producer from Finland. We have three operational assets in Finland and we’re aggressively extending into Eastern Europe. So staying away from all established jurisdictions that conservative money is willing to go to and sort of trying to target the more exotic markets, south east,
currently avoiding all conflict areas. So unfortunately not Ukraine as that requires a bit more different kind of funding than the commercial ones that we’re aiming for.
Adam Sroka (02:01)
That’s really interesting. Are the sources of finance and the investors in Finland or the capital partners that you’re looking at, actively avoiding those regions or other regions that border Russia? Or is it quite straightforward if you avoid the war zone?
Ville Kaituri (02:18)
I hope not. I
not since we have 1200 kilometers of joint border with Russia. Finland has been investing in military training and spending quite a bit of money on it for the past 80 years since we last time fought the Russians. So we sort of knew that you better keep your guard up.
Adam Sroka (02:26)
Mm.
Hmm.
Ville Kaituri (02:46)
But no, I wouldn’t consider the vicinity of Russia being the issue with the financiers. It’s more of, I would say it has to do with the rule of law and the general stability of the society. Like when you go to the Baltics, when you go to Poland, when you go into more like Moldova or Hungary, which could be considered as puppet states of Vladimir.
I think that’s more of the issue. Several investors have limited mandates, like Poland is usually okay, but then again, more East than that is a bit more limited.
Adam Sroka (03:17)
Yeah, okay. That makes sense. Yeah, background in law and medicine. Does that help in your day to day? I think the serial entrepreneur makes me think you obviously like suffering quite a lot if you are keen to do it more than once. So does the background help?
Ville Kaituri (03:22)
Yes.
Yeah.
A lawyer, definitely. Yes. I also have a lawyer wife and that definitely helps in avoiding at least a proportion of the conflict. Medicine, perhaps not that much, although I made some friends who are not doing business. That’s a big plus.
Adam Sroka (03:49)
We’ve done a series of events recently with our lawyers, CMS, who are engaged with a lot of the energy organisations in the UK. And it’s quite interesting actually. And like, I didn’t have the appreciation for how, when you get stuck into a lot of the regulatory frameworks and law ends up being like a lens into like, what’s going to come in 5 to 10 years in the energy sector, because it takes such a long time to get the, like the legals ironed out that
nothing’s kind of in development yet, but it will start happening down the road. It’s interesting. It’s not the life for me, but definitely an interesting mix of skills. And yeah, certainly I can see how it would be useful in navigating some of the complexities of developing assets and things like that.
Ville Kaituri (04:32)
Yeah,
it’s trying to figure out the international project financing and getting investable projects that requires a lot of paperwork.
Me and my closest friend who are running the company are both lawyers. So that definitely helps, at least to save on the legal bills.
Adam Sroka (04:50)
Yeah, of course. And know when you’re kind of getting the right advice and when you aren’t. So Olana Energy you’ve rebranded from Biosolar. Can you walk us through like, yeah, I the history of the organisation and how you’ve come to be where you are?
Ville Kaituri (05:05)
Yeah, we’re turncoats big time. We started with, in beginning of 23, the real estate market crashed. I had nothing to do as my background is in the real estate. I had to figure out something new to do. I was told about the solar opportunities, solar boom in Finland. I was asked to be a CEO of a small development company. I started looking into industry.
Pretty soon I understood that nobody knows anything about solar at the moment in Finland. That’s sort of a good place to start your company.
I know that we had to be working with Solar quite heavily and that was like all that we have achieved. We have had a nice team. We started understanding about the industry, but the projects, they are not worthless, but there’s no market for them. So that’s a bit of a challenge for a young company.
And last February, we actually went like 200 meters that way to the office of our trading partner, Capolo, and they explained to us what is the business case with energy storage. And I had in September 23 Aurora Analytics gave a pitch in Copenhagen Solar Plaza and they told that the payback period of BESS is 5 years.
And I just sort of ruled that out. So, okay, have a 15 year lifetime, 5 year payback period sounds stupid. But then when I heard that it’s actually one year or 1.3 years or whatever, started making much more sense. So then we started working with BESS in February. In April, we sort of made the decision that we’re only working with BESS, are focusing heavily on that. And then although Biosolar has a beautiful greenwash sound to it.
The concept that was based in agri-PV, so sort of making solar align with agricultural needs, enabling us to get along with landowners and make something good, not only for the energy system, but also for the local bio-ecosystem. That didn’t really make sense anymore, or it makes sense, but
didn’t create business opportunities at the time. So we needed a more generic name and we were thinking of it for several months and then driving to our counterhouse, me and my wife, I was like thinking about it out loud and she just said like, why don’t you just call it Olana, something like Olana, because our kids names are Olavi and Ilona. And I started laughing because it’s so funny.
It’s so awfully cheesy, but then I also started crying a bit because I was hungover and it sort of hit the spot. ⁓ Why not? Why not? So then none of the guys shut it down. So then we became Olana and it’s Olana Energy. There’s a feminine tone to it, which is good. It softens up the company in a way perhaps, and it also enables us to do…
whatever we want within the energy industry. So that’s for the long game, that’s good.
Adam Sroka (08:20)
No, I love it. Everyone at Hypercube will know my gripes with a lot of other company names. Like I find that so many companies have terrible, terrible names, like things that you can’t spell or Google or things like that. Similar vibe, right? My kids aren’t called Hypercube, but my… I tried, but the wife wouldn’t have it. But I wanted a name that was like…
Ville Kaituri (08:38)
I’m
Adam Sroka (08:47)
very neutral and sterile. So it’s just a maths term, but it could be pivoted to other things and stuff like that. Yeah, no, think it’s all about a good story, especially being the founder and trying to drive like relationships. It’s half this game is like infotainment and story time with the founder right, to build trust and things. And I think it’s compelling and it’s a good name. It totally works.
Ville Kaituri (09:10)
Easy to pronounce in several languages.
Adam Sroka (09:14)
Yeah, very important,
right? So you’re almost wholly into the BESS space. I think that’s a story that’s really common over here in the GB market. I think lots of people have spotted these attractive revenues as other
energy markets around Europe, especially, are catching up with some of the secondary ancillary services, balancing mechanism, those kinds of services. BESS is certainly on the up across the continent.
What’s your approach to doing it compared to other people in Finland and like other people across these new target countries you’ve suggested earlier?
Ville Kaituri (09:51)
BESS is a funny business case. Most of it in every market is the same, like 80%. It’s a very scalable product. Pretty much need to find a parking lot that is next to electrical substation, all in the gear.
Install it, there’s nothing too difficult than that. Then you have to do the integration. That’s fairly challenging. But we believe that once you get it right, it’s easier to get it right again. There’s a huge need for balancing services or in general balancing mechanisms in the energy market. BESS is the only technically and economically viable solution right now.
it’s happening in several markets at the same time. We are at some sort of turning point in that field. And hence we see that there’s like a massive opportunity right now. So what we’re trying to do, enter as many markets as possible,
as fast as possible, trying to find a scalable concept. How do we provide the relevant support that makes sense in every market from here in Finland? What do we need locally? How do we enable the people locally working to get this started as soon as possible? I’m a big people person and
stemming from that has sort of started the idea that, okay, let’s start with the people. Everybody in the business starts with the projects. Yeah. Okay. But there’s like a tonne of projects. There’s good ones, there are bad ones. If you develop 10 projects, eight of them are going to be shit. One is going to be okay. And one is a really good one. So let’s not focus on the projects. First, find the people. Try to identify like really unique, people like these curious, bold, entrepreneurial type people.
And enable them to do their best.
We’ve had these founder summits in Finland where we just get the guys over, work with our team, try to distill as much information as possible, and then just send the guys back and let them do their thing. And this is how we believe that we can actually scale at a speed that…
is not possible in anything else than software business, I believe. And that’s pretty cool to be working in infrastructure, working in energy and actually having this opportunity to build quickly a high growth company in the industry. It’s pretty cool. But I think everything boils down to speed and people.
It’s a matter of seconds in this game. When you are looking at the financial model and you know the cost of every day. Usually there’s no cost that cannot be justified by looking at the cost of a single day if you succeed. Naturally, we still avoid all the costs. Although I love consultants, we try to gather in-house
knowledge and do everything in-house and we’re pretty heavy on that. We have a team of 10, 11 people now depending on how you count it and we can perform all the value-adding tasks of the process in-house, meaning that everything is that difficult that requires ⁓ shepherding the subcontractors because it’s the same situation everywhere. No one knows how this works.
It starts with the basics like, okay, somebody asks you what’s a battery, then they’re going to be thinking about fire safety. Then you have to explain how everything is done and how it’s like super safe and the amount of battery fires is very minimal. And if you have a fire, it’s compartmentalised into a unit that is the size of a fridge and the container is going to be outside anyhow so the damage is very small. You have to understand and explain everything. That’s the first thing.
If you like try to outsource that consultant who knows less of the subject than you do, doesn’t really make sense. So as we’re pioneering an industry, we actually have to know everything and control everything. The principle we have is that you cannot outsource ownership. Like you can outsource work, you can outsource whatever, but the ownership and responsibility for everything has to be in-house and the knowledge.
Adam Sroka (14:19)
I completely agree. mean, this could turn into a 4 hour chat about just this topic alone. This is kind of close to my heart. And I agree. think a lot of people have had their fingers burned by consultants and third parties that don’t understand the space. It was the reason when we started that we were effectively like super niche consultancy data and AI for BESS in the GB market, because actually there was only a
Ville Kaituri (14:23)
Yes.
Adam Sroka (14:49)
handful of people that understood how to do that. And we were some of them. So it’s this huge advantage saying, actually, yeah, I know how to build the data platforms, the forecasts, the models. I understand how batteries are traded. I understand how all the ancillary services work and to be able to build software technology quickly that’s scaled with the changing of the markets and the changing of the demand of like different providers coming online and usher
young organisations like Olana and others through their nascent sort of early stages with the software technology part. It was a huge advantage for us when we grow and we’ve expanded now to like we do lots of other energy stuff. But I deeply believe that
Ville Kaituri (15:23)
Okay.
Adam Sroka (15:34)
The industry knowledge is really, really pivotal. I’ve had conversations with other founders of more established developers and huge pension funded ones. And similar vibe actually, they’ve said that when asked the question, how do you expand to other markets? Peter Kavanagh from Harmony Energy, we spoke to him. How did you build your Australia and New Zealand business so quickly? And he said the same thing. He said, you have to find someone that you trust wholly.
That has that entrepreneurial spirit and then just give them the tools to succeed. And if you get that recipe right, it will scale and it will grow. And you build like leader doers that can make your business operate in other timezones, other countries. I guess there’s a risk appetite that comes with that. And some of the larger organisations just don’t have and can’t go after.
Do you think being entrepreneurial and having that experience and your risk appetite maybe being a bit higher than others, do you think that’s acting as an advantage for you at Olana just now?
Ville Kaituri (16:35)
Of course, we don’t have external equity investors in the company, we don’t have committees, especially investment committees. Everything happens.
Adam Sroka (16:45)
Hmm.
Ville Kaituri (16:49)
As we go forward, if we do decisions, it’s based on a WhatsApp discussion between 2, maximum of 3 people, some thumbs up and let’s just go. Somebody press an enter, email goes and let’s see what happens. Of course, there has to be a process. You have to think about risks. I’ve never ever in my life have I thought so much about risks, when you have 80% of the information, you just have to go forward and you can’t wait. It’s just so frustrating to wait.
And also you miss out on the early days of the market when you make the most money. So if we’re going to reach our growth targets, target being in 27, we’ll have a gigawatt of either operational or under construction assets. To reach that, we can’t lose any days. And also we have to be able to get the high revenues from the first years. That’s going to enable even faster growth.
I hate the term agile. It’s like, yeah, but being agile in decision-making is probably one of the key differentiating factors we have. Like, of course we have to satisfy the bank’s demands. We have to satisfy investor demands. We have to get the due diligence processes in order and know our stuff. But still the fact that we can enter these processes and move
freely when there’s a requirement from an investor, you have to do this, then next week we do it, or preferably the same week. So it’s not like a lot of back and forth. A lot of layers of decision making
Adam Sroka (18:24)
But again, similar story. We don’t have any external equity backers or anything like that. We’re all funded by our own profits and bootstrapped. Yeah, that same experience, like can make decisions quickly. We can try things. We can take bets. And someone asked me, we’ve got to a size now, that stuff’s motoring and we’re expanding. And someone asks me about, how do you do this and how do you do that? And acting as CEO. I genuinely feel like…
It’s 90% storytelling and it’s about like telling people the story. Like you tell your customers, I understand what you do. I understand your pains. I understand how to solve them. You tell your staff, like, I can build a good culture or I’ll have interesting problems for you. There’s a good future for you here. And if you can convince people of those stories over and over and over again, they start to self-perpetuate and grow. And then you get other storytellers in the business that do the same thing. But I think that
Ville Kaituri (18:53)
Okay.
Adam Sroka (19:20)
Secondhand, third-hand communication when you’re dealing with bigger bureaucracies is really challenging when you’re used to working so quickly and you know that what you know is quite complicated because it took you years to learn it, right? It you years to learn and understand this. And then having to translate that into like 5 slides that someone at the bank is going to translate to their manager is, yeah, I can imagine quite a painful process.
Ville Kaituri (19:43)
To be honest, I don’t know what they’re pitching inside the house. It’s either green light or red light.
That’s how it goes. If you’re a good storyteller, you’re going to build a business or do something else, like meaningful in your life. But that’s one thing how you can use stories.
Adam Sroka (20:04)
Yeah, for me, think communication is the main skill and everything else. Like if you can communicate well and you’ve got the right intentions, I think everything else flows from that. I want to get into talking of bankers and so did an event recently and we’re talking to a merchant bank that were responsible for quite a lot of infrastructure, like interesting infrastructure projects here in the UK market. And actually he said that
There are no vanilla projects left, in GB, all of the new projects that are coming online. There’s something challenging or there’s an existing headache that needs to be factored in. There’s no pure greenfield, yeah, just build this, plug it in and off you go. Because of things like the grid connection queues and regulatory changes has caused, like gummed up the system. Do you…
see any of that on the continent and where you’re looking at developing sites or is it much earlier and more like Greenfield?
Ville Kaituri (21:02)
Yeah, we don’t have to deal with that because we’re going into markets like which is actually in advance, of course,
Okay, the grid applications are congested. That’s a thing happening throughout East Europe, around the Baltics. Like people have understood that there’s a possibility in renewables, they might have applied for the grid with the solar project, but now they are converting it to BESS or whatever. So navigating the grid is definitely a challenge. But then again, there is a tonne of capacity. So if you’re willing to buy projects, which
sort of against the genetics of the company, but we have to do it just to get forward faster. For example, in Poland, if we start Greenfield today, we’re super happy to get it to RTB in 12 months. It might take longer. But the grid is an issue, but still there’s so much capacity that we can do like standalone BESS which makes it
more clear, easier for us. So that’s the only thing we do. Stand-alone BESS, no co-location, at least for now. Know the technology. We have a few component providers that we use. Just scale everything as much as we can. Try to use the same trading partner whenever possible and just scale the same thing.
Adam Sroka (22:25)
Nice that you can marry up that supply chain so that it allows you to just drive project efficiencies, delivery, and work on the harder problems as opposed to trying to rediscover partnerships for every engagement.
Ville Kaituri (22:37)
Definitely if I wanted to find something that’s like a big industrial unit that has an existing grid capacity that we could harness. We haven’t been able to do that. There’s one project in Finland, for example, somebody’s trying to build like a massive ⁓ green steel hydrogen using plants actually close to Helsinki and there’s like 1.7 gigawatts connection or something.
If somebody’s listening, I’m very interested, but it’s very difficult to get this because they are like behind a lot of committees and there’s like a plan that in 7 years somebody’s going to invest. So 7 year time horizon doesn’t really justify this. Well, it might just, but it’s challenging if we’re going to have to relocate all the gear. We have only done new connections so far.
Adam Sroka (23:22)
And you see that being the case in Poland’s been mentioned a few times. That’s the direction of travel for Olana. Can you just riff a little bit on why is Poland such an attractive place to move next?
Ville Kaituri (23:34)
Massive market, heavily dependent on imported energy. lot of coal still, it’s going renewable. High electricity prices, high volatility, especially in the summer. The market mechanics has been introduced last July, meaning that they liberated the pricing and enabled ancillary services. Naturally, the revenues has been off the charts since
then. It’s normalising. Of course, we are betting that it’s not going to go to single digit numbers in a few years. If everything goes well, we’ll have an operational asset in December there. So I see a lot of opportunities also for an entrepreneur-led company, Poland is a good place to mess around.
We’re not buying a project. Like from two guys, they are a bit more senior. They’ve already sort of made their impression on life. They’re like, next thing they’re going to be doing is retirement or I don’t know, but still. They are negotiating in a manner that no international investor would ever consider. It’s a lot of back and forth. It’s not structured.
There’s a bit of bargaining at every change, every turn. You can’t get a meeting or you might. It’s just like entering these new nascent markets that are in a very early stage. You’re going to meet developers and projects that are managed by unprofessional or more normal people. And that doesn’t really yet provide opportunities as well to international players.
There has to be people like us going in there, brushing up the projects, making the documentation, make it bankable, and then put it on the market. But that’s again going to be another 6 months or 12 months or whatever. So it’s nice to be there first, first try to figure out the mess. And definitely once again, having the decision making fairly centralised helps on that.
Adam Sroka (25:46)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, there’s like other types of organisation aren’t as optimised as a small, fast moving, but wholly owned company like yours to actually capitalise on those inefficiencies and make advantages out of some of those challenges. Whereas bigger players might just get bogged down in that and not having the sheer willpower to drive through some of the mud to get to an efficient project.
Ville Kaituri (26:09)
All right.
Adam Sroka (26:15)
So you’ve talked a little bit
previously about how traditional infrastructure investment models don’t really work for storage. Could you break that down a little?
Ville Kaituri (26:23)
Yeah, well, I guess they do, but you just have to buy a report from Aurora or one of the analytics houses and trust that. But it’s sort of silly because If you’re working in infra, you’re assuming a 20 – 30 year investment investment lifetime and assuming that everything’s stable. But batteries as such, are meant for volatile situations. They are meant for the
days, minutes, hours when everything goes south and that’s where they are most critical and provide the most value. So this 15-year prediction making, at least to me, it seems very silly because you have to be able to invest in this. You need to be able to believe that there’s a need for storage capacity. There’s a need for balancing mechanisms.
That this technology is going to be the best one for the near future. And you’re going to have to believe that there’s going to be fragmentation and volatility increases in the market. And that’s what you’re betting on. And if somebody’s like trying to forecast what’s going to happen in the energy market in 5 years, they’re just like pissing in the wind and that’s not going to be accurate anyhow. So that’s maybe my dilemma with
the infrastructure investment methods in the game. Then again, I can’t complain. There are few things that you can summon up equally much financing because it’s within the infrastructure ⁓ domain, meaning that you get reasonable or slightly less reasonable terms, massive amounts of financing being available.
I have some a bit of an issue with venture capital financing, for example. If you get a 100k from some random guy, he’s going to instill like all sorts of locks and veto rights and whatever on you. If you get a 50 million from Commerce Bank, they’re not even going to come to your board meetings. Just pay off your debt and they’re going to be happy. So I don’t think of another place where you can get as much.
Adam Sroka (28:38)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ville Kaituri (28:43)
capital on an equally sort of friendly terms. So I can’t really complain too much. But it’s just the investment process is not perhaps the best suited for energy storage.
Adam Sroka (28:56)
When looking at investors
or partners, what qualities or understanding do you think they need to work effectively in the energy storage space?
Ville Kaituri (29:02)
Naturally, it would be great if they are able to move a bit faster. I really value if the counterpart that I’m thinking about working with has experience in BESS. We’ve been talking with Finnish banks, for example, and it starts with the basics, like what’s a battery? And that’s a long way off from…
actually getting to an investment decision. So the fact that there are European banks that have already exposed themselves to the battery projects, that’s the prerequisite. Of course, if there was an interested investor without previous experience who are big enough and the terms are favourable enough, naturally we’re willing to educate them on the topic.
But if you’re talking about modest sized projects, it simply does not make sense. Or at least there has to be somebody else who’s already been there knocking on the doors and laid down the groundwork. Otherwise it’s just going to take so long that you’re going to find money somewhere else faster.
Adam Sroka (30:08)
Second mover advantage.
Ville Kaituri (30:10)
Exactly.
Adam Sroka (30:10)
And to change gears a little bit, most interested in hearing like, what do you do with data, AI and software technology in and across Olana?
Ville Kaituri (30:20)
Well, we’re a bit lazy with that since we don’t fade ourselves. So naturally we have to have a view on the market. We have to understand the market, we can’t really claim to be the masters of grasping the opportunities in the market or having a future for it. So we’re compiling as much data from other parties and trying to mess around with that, make our own view.
And just try to sort of tell the story to a financier that we know what we’re doing and then just go forward. If the market metrics are there, like for example, Poland it’s easy to understand why it makes sense. It’s also easy to understand why Norway doesn’t make sense or France. So when you have a market that
you decide to believe in, then you just go in and don’t think about it. It doesn’t help at all. If you decided to invest, just go forward. Perhaps the interesting stuff we do with data that we’re trying to do is taking care of our batteries. We want to have visibility to a cell level of all our systems. We need to have notifications of every issue that appears. We need to be able to prioritise that information
to make sure that we have the best possible uptime, that we don’t miss out on those opportunities that might present themselves for 15 minutes here and there. So that’s where data comes in for us. Of course, we’re also trying to build some sort of information flows within the company, but that’s really not there yet. Actually, that’s why we’re hiring a COO now. So somebody should know what…
what time it is. ⁓
Adam Sroka (32:10)
Very good, very good. Exciting to see how that plays out. And I guess, yeah, like the forecasting piece is hard. Like you’ve said before that the only certainty in energy markets is the volatility. Can you expand on what that means to you as a BESS operator?
Ville Kaituri (32:26)
Increasing volatility. Well, I think people listening to this are probably familiar with the fact that we’re going renewable. We are exposed to much more unpredictable energy sources. Also, at least in Finland, also I’ve understood it’s a European trend. we are moving away from gas, which is a steady source of energy.
Both the consumption and the production side are becoming harder to forecast. They’re happening at peak times here and there. Basic stuff for people who are listening probably. But I guess we have to try to see what are the drivers for this volatility and make our investment decisions based on that.
Why do we see that Finland is going to experience a lot of volatility? Well, we have a tonne of wind and we’re going to be getting much more. So that’s definitely one driver. We’re exchanging everything, all the heating equipment into electrical boilers, pretty much. And There’s a lot of heating in Finland, as you might imagine. Although climate change is happening, but it hasn’t still reached that much.
We still need quite a bit of electricity, so that’s fairly easy to understand in the Finnish field. But then how can these things be identified in the markets that we’re considering? That’s probably key for us.
Adam Sroka (33:41)
Yes, sir.
And so we’ve talked a lot about the infrastructure, investment, markets. What about like the regulatory environment in Finland and I guess the rest of the EU? How do you think that needs to evolve to support BESS growth?
Ville Kaituri (34:07)
BESS and renewables. Well, we need to go full mercantilistic. don’t know if it’s an English word. If everybody else are going to be pumping up their industries globally, we need to do the same. Like Whether it’s tariffs or not, I don’t know. There has to be subsidies. This industry is based on government interference. This is a responsible action of society that cannot be based on the
goodwill of people and corporations. So like nothing relating to renewables is built in Europe. Investment subsidies, naturally that’s money in the pockets of capitalists, but if you want to build an industry, that’s how you do it. In Finland, we started with tariffs on wind, like 80 euros a megawatt hour or something.
that was a good business back then, but that created a proper wind energy industry in Finland. Currently everything is based on commercial terms. There’s no subsidies and still there’s investments happening. Like there was just 700 million investment into wind, although electricity future prices are really low in Finland right now. So if you want to build an industry.
If you want to build it fast, you need government to push it forward. Another stuff for regulation.
It has to be clarified. It cannot be blocking investments. You can’t go all German on this. It has to enable operators to make the best decisions. Especially in energy storage where the whole technology is just a few years in the making. It’s been existing for a longer time, but still the technology is developing at a really fast
pace. And you need to enable the operators and the developers and the IPPs to get the latest possible technology and not sort of block it with some silly regulation. And also to try out things a little bit because it’s still new. One massive issue I’m hearing all around, like I’ve been touring the Baltic Sea and with visibility
is a challenge. Like just starting with the fact that you need to have somebody who answers the phone at the grid company and tell you like, hey, here’s capacity in the electrical substation, build something next to it. We have this in Finland. We have guys who answer the phone. They even answer WhatsApp. They might give you a call and see how’s it going. That’s epic. And that’s unique. In Denmark, they have this heat map system.
Meaning that they divide the whole country into like a thousand zones, update it monthly and tell you whether this micro area is over consumption or overproduction and they price it accordingly. Okay. That makes it a bit hard to estimate when it’s changing monthly, but still very transparent. So that’s the direction we want to go to. Like if we consider Poland, there you have this sort of
old school way of thinking that this is a government agency. We cannot discriminate. We cannot give anyone better or worse service. So we give shitty service to everybody. Meaning that you have a thousand electrical substations. Nobody has any clue where is the capacity. Then you have the guys who know somebody applying for the right places.
Then you have the reports of the applications and that’s how people sort of study and analyse the grid by looking at how many applications are done. And that requires work and it just creates these rushes into each point of capacity when somebody figures it out. And that is just so silly. They could just build an interactive map online or hire a couple of customer servants.
They don’t have it. So then you apply for the grid capacity. Then after 4 months, somebody replies on your application that, yeah, there was a mistake in your application in page 4, paragraph C. So please send another one and talk to you in 4 months. Or not talk to you, I’ll send you a paper mail. That’s like a regulation issue that definitely needs to change. But we’re going there.
Even like Poland, there’s a new bit of regulation coming in this year and they’re cutting down on the processing times and there’s going to be more visibility. So we’re going in the right direction, but just a tad slow.
Adam Sroka (38:28)
Painful to sort of watch the pace of government change when you used to working at speed.
Ville Kaituri (38:34)
definitely. Like it was unfathomable after the Ukrainian war. We’ve been thinking about NATO now for like 50 years in Finland. I was just like, why are you not doing it now? The war might end and then we like lose out on the excuse because the thinking has always been like, we can’t do it because we’re going to piss off the Russians. Then there was like 6 months of back and forth. The politicians were definitely doing their thing. They were working on it, but it’s just like
There’s a war going on. How can it take 6 months? Then they pushed it through and now we’re members of NATO. That is apparently a useless organisation these days, but still we got in. us. Yeah, last guys to partake.
Adam Sroka (39:14)
Just at the right time.
That’s still less embarrassing than Brexit.
It’s been amazing talking to you. Really interested to see how Olana Energy expands and grows over the coming years and gets to your gigawatt of capacity and beyond. Before we let anyone go, I always just like to ask if there’s anything you want to promote or plug, or if people want to find out more about you, where should we point them?
Ville Kaituri (39:46)
We are going to get some social media activity. It’s been very erratic for now, but LinkedIn is a good place. That’s where the grownups go to. We also have Instagram, that’s not very professional, but you can still follow us there as well. Or you can just give us a call and come over at the office here.
Helsinki were like 200 meters from the railway station. If you are in Eastern Europe or beyond in a developing market that has just had or is about to have a liberalisation of the energy market and the introduction of ancillary services and you’re slightly crazy and willing to work
around the clock and make your life really difficult, please join us. And if you are a bag of money or you hold a bag of money and you want to invest in renewables or energy sources specifically, please give me a call and talk.
Adam Sroka (40:49)
It’s been a great conversation. Thank you and yeah, all the best.
Ville Kaituri (40:55)
All the best. Thank you.
Ciara Inglis (40:58)
Amazing to hear about all the exciting things going on at Olana Energy. It’s interesting to see how they’re tackling developing and interesting new markets like Poland and the Baltics because of the freshness of projects and the way things are done and how they’re using like data and AI to do interesting stuff around battery analytics and health and start to optimise their operations. So really interesting chat and
Yeah, excited to see where Olana goes in the next few years.
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