Corporate PPAs, power demand and customer-led energy

Adam Sroka (00:17)
Hello and welcome back to the HyperCube podcast. I’m joined today by Iles Patel, Thank you for joining us, Iles. Could you start off by explaining who you are, what you do, what the Liberty Global do, and what’s your role in the ever so wonderful energy system?

Ilesh Patel (00:34)
Adam, good afternoon from rainy old London. Absolutely delighted to join you. I should say at the outset, I am an unashamed energy geek, as you can see from my study over here. have wind, Lego wind turbine behind me.

I’ve had the privilege of working with utilities, regulators, energy companies across the energy transition now for 25 years. I was a partner and helped build the market leading energy advisory business firm known as Beringa Partners.

from over 20 people to 500 consultants across Europe, Asia, Australia, and the US. An absolute privilege to have done that. I think some of the work we did was at the forefront of helping our clients develop, define, successfully implement strategies to navigate the energy transition and investments in low carbon projects. So a lot of fun as well. ⁓ We made stuff up as we went along, by the way. Just about everybody did. ⁓ Worked with policymakers as well, which is great fun. Policies at the heart of the energy transition, as you know. Technology is the heart of it.

spend a lot of time with some of the companies that you know well around the tech and distributed energy space as well, which is great fun. ⁓ financing is important as well. And one of the I know we’ll touch on later is the role of financing in this transition. Nothing moves without capital. And that includes technology, whether in physical form or virtual, it’s really important.

My personal perspective, I live in London, I’m passionate about shaping a low carbon future, making Net Zero a reality by building energy transition businesses, connecting that dots, or connecting the dots rather, across the energy industry to be better together. And I love investing in talent and galvanizing teams. ⁓ By history, so just maybe just a minute on that, Adam, I retired from the amazing firm that was Beringa, which has some great people and expertise in 2023.

My hope was I would spend a year on the beach with my family, but two things scuppered that. Katrina, my wife, we both have two amazing boys who are still in school. So that got scuppered quite quickly. She vetoed the idea of a beach for me for a year. And in an act of fate, about seven minutes after I announced my retirement from brewing on LinkedIn, Liberty Global called up. And I think the fateful words were uttered, boy, do we have an offer for you, words to sink dread into anybody when you hear those things.

Adam Sroka (02:44)
⁓ no.

Ilesh Patel (02:50)
So I joined Liberty Global just at the very front end of 2024, initially as chief commercial officer of our energy transition businesses, which at the time had three main businesses, which is Believe, our EV charging business. You might know them if you live in Wandsworth. We a load of EV chargers hanging around on us in many other boroughs, really successful business, led by a great guy called Guy Bartlett. X Solutions, our rooftop solar and battery storage, we’re behind the meter solutions. You know, it relies a lot on tech and data as well, which we may touch on later.

Another business I founded, is Eggpower, which I know we’ll focus on today. So Eggpower is Liberty Global’s clean energy infrastructure investment business. We deliver renewable energy solutions to meet the really fast growing demand from enterprises for affordable, secure, clean energy in Europe. We’re part of Liberty Global’s, what we call our growth investment portfolio, which invests in scalable businesses across technology, media, sports and infrastructure. That’s where we kind of sit within the Liberty Global ecosystem.

And our mission is to meet that need for clean energy by investing in large scale solar wind projects to supply customers with clean energy under long-term corporate power purchase agreements. being part of Global is great, and I’ll stop in a second. We get access to an incredible set of expertise in financing and scaling up businesses and serving B2B customers. The network of Liberty Global, you may have seen the news this week.

We’ve just announced a merger of the acquisition of Vodafone Stake and Vodafone Zygo to merge with our telnet business as well. We’ve just taken on a new fiber business on a VM02. So you can see that the access to technology, tech companies, telecom companies, that’s a space which we just really know well and I’m a beneficiary that with my business.

Adam Sroka (04:31)
Yeah, the scale of like access and being able to move mountains that you can’t do as a smaller leader or that’s really cool.

Ilesh Patel (04:38)
I like to think myself as a garard startup within a very, very enormous, you know, Volkswagen style building. So the garard startup, which is only just me and a 21 year old grad, think, you know, felt like a garard startup, but we felt that we were well housed within an overall building that an infrastructure which enabled us to do things.

Adam Sroka (04:47)
Yeah.

I can imagine how that must feel. Look, fellow consultants, so you didn’t hiss when we first started speaking, which was quite nice, but you’ve had some journey, right? You’ve talked through it there. mean, even just just thinking about your time as a consultant in Baringa and growing to such a huge practice, you must have seen some horror stories and learned some fun stuff along the way about energy transition. How has that experience shaped how you think about the transition today?

Ilesh Patel (05:29)
Yeah, that’s a great question. And first I’ve been very lucky to have a chance to build two businesses in as you transition one advisory and one doing as I describe it to my wife. It used to be that the curse of the consultant and the horror story of consultants is you never get to see the end product. You get to, as you probably know, right? You you get to provide all the lovely advice and they never get to the end journey. Well, now I’ve got the end journey without the advice, which is a slightly off position to be in. Both involve some risk and hard yards, but also very different.

Building energy transition businesses is really hard, whether it’s advisory or building. When it’s investing, you need a great strategy, a great product, and to win customers. Build something to deliver those customers what they want, finance, hire great people. There’s a load of things in there that you learn over the years in building businesses. The one thing I think I’d say is, I believe there are loads of really smart people in the energy industry who have great ideas.

which really see the light of day because The difference between a great idea and a great business is execution. And execution just comes in two parts. A kind of relentless and clear focus and vision strategy and ability to galvanize people, capital and your industry around an idea. And then this kind of relentless focus on delivery and problem solving. There is no silver bullet which solves all the challenges you’re ever gonna face.

It’s just a thousand silver pellets and doing the right thing over and over again and the results will follow. So I started with that simple thesis, you know, that the customer is the important thing here. And sometimes forgotten about the energy transition. One of my big learnings from Baringa where I’ve seen businesses and companies that I have advised fail is because they came with this idea that boy, I’ve got a great product here. I’ve got great technology or I’ve a great idea. And they just haven’t done any of the thinking around.

Does the customer want it? What problem does it help the customer solve? So at the industry level, think four things really shake my thinking. And I step back from that a little bit. These huge structural shifts in power supply and demand are going to disrupt the energy transition. We know that. And it’s been happening for 20 years now. The cost of energy is everything. You know, the old world where we thought there’s a blank check that consumers prepared to write to underpin the answer to the con.

⁓ Some technologies are overhyped, but core tech is still key and underserved and raising capital and deploying capital are difficult. So there’s kind of four kind of things that I’ve learned over the years. And I’ve seen the horror stories and the real success stories. And those four things are so, so important. Navigating those four things feels really, really important.

Adam Sroka (07:59)
Yeah, I love the point on execution and the like similar experience. Energy is full of genius level people that are much more talented than I am. But I think a lot of people, even the the brightest and greatest, sometimes struggle to conceptualize that if you’re within a very complicated network system, and not I’m not talking about the energy system. mean, like just the businesses, the capital, all of it, that everything you do,

Ilesh Patel (08:08)
Thanks.

Adam Sroka (08:28)
causes a change somewhere else that causes a problem near where you are. There’s always like, you make a change and it might solve a thing, but it’s going to upset something else. And the cascading effects are almost intractable to predict and understand. And so the reality of when you get into the grind and the tech, the piece of our mind like, we’ve got a great product, let’s go.

but not being totally customer led is really, really hard. That’s why I started a consultancy because I thought I didn’t want to be one of these tech founders that had a thesis, raised loads of money on a big bet and went for it. Whereas now I’ve got years of experience. All I do is serve the customer and I understand real problems. And sometimes they’re too niche to be productized, but sometimes they’re not. And so I totally just agree with that. Maybe it’s the consultancy kind of reflection and experience and stuff, but

You’ve talked a little bit here previously about how the only real structural growth in power demand probably now comes from telco and digital infrastructure. How do you see this shift in the shape of demand affect the transition?

Ilesh Patel (09:35)
So again, it’s one of those things that it’s well covered at him in both trade press, mainstream press, LinkedIn, research articles. But it boils down to kind of really simple stuff at the end of the day. For the first time in decades, power demand is growing in modern economies. You start with that. That’s driven by telcos and digital infrastructure. Very, simple.

That represents a risk and an opportunity. Exactly as you described in this interconnected system. What happens when you throw an extra 20 gigawatts demand into the UK power system or a couple of hundred gigawatts into the US? No one knows. Okay, because no one’s ever done it before. Okay. At a pace and scale that you’re doing. So the risk of unintended consequences of that is really high unless we understand how we are going to respond to demand from telco and digital, which is not going anywhere.

Adam Sroka (10:15)
Yeah.

Ilesh Patel (10:29)
You can have differing views on the pace of that growth, how quickly it’s going to ramp, whether the AI boom is going to end in the next few years. But we know for absolute certainty that power demand is likely to rise driven by those industries in the next few years, at least. Then the piece comes in, who pays for it? How do we de-risk individual consumers like you and I from paying for infrastructure being utilized by these amazing digital infrastructure companies? Is that the right answer?

Adam Sroka (10:46)
Mm.

Ilesh Patel (10:56)
for clean energy landscape we want, which is we’re on the hook not only for paying for data on our devices, but we’re the hook for paying for the energy that supplies it. Is that the right answer? I don’t think it is, by the way. So I think it’s a responsibility of the industry actually to make sure it’s our problem. And what you said just really resonated, which is how do you integrate this thinking? Is there some kind of guiding hand that’s going to…

magically integrate all this thinking across power demand growth, energy infrastructure, grid infrastructure, optimizer, of course there’s not. Where this comes into reality and where it hits reality very quickly is it’s not going to be government that’s able to do that because government A doesn’t have a bandwidth to do it, B doesn’t have a capital to deploy it, can make supporting gestures, policy frameworks, etc to do it, potentially provide contractual support for those things.

It’s going to to be the industry itself. It’s going to have to be. And I believe they’re leaders in this already, but the major tech firms are going to have to continue to support clean energy infrastructure, support their growing power demand and be the masters of their own destiny. And I think they’re really good at it, by the way. Got some really smart energy people in the organo who know what they’re doing, who know how to buy clean energy, where they need it, how they need it. And they need support from the rest of the energy industry to go and do it. And that’s why I set up this business. Because I think it’s just a gap.

I think people have missed this. This is the only game in town. If you want a government subsidy under a CFD regime in the UK, a refit in Ireland, crack on. There are great companies doing that, and they’ll make some money, and they’ll deliver some great clear super-groups. I think this is a much more interesting problem to go and solve. How do you meet the demands of these big tech digital telecom companies for the next 10 years?

Adam Sroka (12:41)
I think that’s great. you’ve reminded me, I read a like it’s almost borderline dystopian left wing propaganda. I loved it though. Book called Vassal State. And it’s about how a lot of the basically American tax system and American companies funnel like so much money into the US. And it talks about infrastructure in one part. And it says the difference between like the UK and I think it’s France where the telco system is still privatized.

Ilesh Patel (12:50)
Okay.

Adam Sroka (13:09)
So France doesn’t have this problem, right? And it’s private companies that bear the burden. But in the UK, we’ve semi-nationalized like this, the monopoly around the open reach, right? And it says that that works if the usage of the system, of the infrastructure is fairly distributed. That kind of works. However, something like 70%, and I’ll get the numbers wrong, because was a while ago, but it was like 60, 70 % of all of the traffic on

Openreach goes to six websites and they’re all American tech giants. So, so like more than half the cost of the infrastructure upgrade is hoovered up by someone profiting off of the fact that it exists that doesn’t pay tax in the UK. And it was just like, and it’s the whole book’s basically things like that. Talked about how like Amazon overloads the local waste recycling stuff, which is then passing the cost of waste disposal onto local governments and stuff. And it was just like, it’s an interesting book, but it’s exactly that. It’s like the

Ilesh Patel (13:41)
That’s my destiny.

Thank

Adam Sroka (14:09)
The infrastructure, public purse, like sort of private business triad is so interesting and hard to unpick because ultimately we can’t just go and build them. We can’t build a new piece of infrastructure like this scale and the cheap. Someone’s got to pay for it. And the system that we live in is that’s the way it shapes. Like it’s a really hard problem to solve, I think. So good on you for going after it.

Ilesh Patel (14:32)
I think it’s exactly right.

And it’s too hard to solve the aggregate level, which I think is what you’re saying, because there’s unintended consequences you get out from any action you take, either in public policy or in private investment. And therefore, it will be back to my silver bullets example. It’s going to be 1,000 silver pellets, doing the right things over and over again, doing them well, and the results will follow. Because I don’t think there is a single answer to any of these challenges or problems.

Adam Sroka (14:57)
So like, I think we’ve bumped into quite quickly, yeah, location and starting, you’ve talked about starting with a customer, I guess, what benefits do you think or like, why are you extolling the virtues of being customer led? Like expand on that point for me a little bit. How does that help other people in this space do better in the transition?

Ilesh Patel (15:17)
So the history of renewable energy purchasing by corporate customers where power focus is and where we set the vision I talked about earlier was.

There’s fantastic renewable energy project developers in Europe out there. They do an incredible job of finding sites, getting planning, getting land, getting grid. And then that takes about five years, by the way, for solar and wind between four and seven years for solar. So they spend a lot of money at risk of hoping to have a project. And it’s only at the very end they think about, who am going to sell the power to? Am I selling it to the grid? Am I selling it to government? Because if government’s got a supporting regime in place.

And their typical business model for many, years has been great. When they get to that kind of stage, they sell it to someone who either finds a customer, but certainly even if they found a customer already or have a contract for designer power over the long term required for non recourse debt financing, which enables great leverage and better returns. They then sell that project to a long-term owner. Pension funds, private equity, infrastructure capital. Great. What a great model that is. Great model, except it comes with the caveat that I described earlier, which is

it’s a product looking for a customer, as opposed to starting with what the customer wants. And we reverse that logic. So we’re building an energy transition infrastructure business, we think, with a difference. The difference is We’re focused on the largest consumers of power in Europe, and we start by focusing on understanding and meeting their needs. As it happens, Their needs are pretty simple. It’s clean energy delivered on time at a competitive price with a partner that dedicated them. I mean, it’s not rocket science.

Adam Sroka (16:25)
Mm-hmm.

when I play.

Mm-hmm.

Ilesh Patel (16:52)
I’m taking no credit for this idea, right? I hopefully take it to execution

and rebuild the business, right? But the idea is so simple. In practice, what that means is we’re investing and kind of inverting the industry model because we’re going to go and talk to the customer first and then we’re going to find out from the customer, what do you want? Solar or wind? Do you want solar and battery? Is it going to work? Do you want something that’s close to London? Do you want it close to Dublin? You know, where do you want the power? When do you want it? Do want it now? Do you want it in three years time?

What mix do you want? How much do you want? So we just start with some really simple questions and hey, lo and behold, if you ask the customer what they want, they actually do sometimes tell you what they want. And then once we know what they want, great. Okay, we’ve got a range of incredible partners that we work with who’ve made that early investment in projects in solar and wind to get to a stage. And we go and find the perfect match.

And my team at laugh at me when I say this, but it’s almost like a little bit of dating game. What we’re trying to find is this perfect date between the customer and what they want and the project that exists that meets what they want. And we’re matching those together. And then we go and acquire that project. And then we guarantee to the customer that we’re going to deliver it rather than trade them off against a better offer that might come across or a better date. If you’ll accept that example, right? That might come across in the next few weeks. We’re just saying, great. You’ve told us what you want. Here it is. Is this what you wanted? Great. Let’s agree.

an incredible deal for you on competitive price, clean energy and the timing on that. And in that context, what customers are looking for that we found is reliability. I kind of realised reliability is a superpower. There’s usually an opportunity to be able to service to a customer anywhere that you want, as long as you’re reliable. If you’re going to be there for them, they’ll deal with you over and over again. And we’ve got some great relationships now with some of the global tech type majors, but also smaller customers.

Adam Sroka (18:26)
Mm-hmm.

Ilesh Patel (18:40)
We know who you are and we trust you. You’re backed by Liberty Global, which is fantastic, but you know you will be there for us. And you’ve got this great idea that we’re just going to deliver our clean energy when we want it and to exactly the specification that we want.

Adam Sroka (18:52)
I guess it’s, yeah, it’s like the evolution of any market in that you’ve gone from broad brush, everyone gets to eat porridge, like that’s the energy and that’s it, to you’re turning around and saying, actually, some people don’t want porridge, they want this type of thing or that. But it just probably hasn’t happened quite the same way in energy because of the shared pipes and all that stuff. It’s quite an interesting way to look at it. It begs the question.

Has it only just become possible that you’ll get customers of a scale that make it a legitimate business? Was it too difficult before or has it just not been tried before?

Ilesh Patel (19:29)
I mean, the corporate PPA market, is the contract instrument which allows large customers to buy clean energy over the long term, it’s been around for at least a decade. I mean, I remember helping Tesco’s by a huge amount of power about seven or eight years ago. So this is not only a contract, BT was one of the market leaders in the UK, but some of the big European.

telcos me around, the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, they’ve been market leaders for a number of years now. They’ve done a great job and the industry served them well. But at the time, what we have now, I think, is a situation of two things happening. One is the clean energy targets across Europe, particularly in the UK, but certainly across Europe as well, are getting nearer.

both for the corporates and for government. And there’s what I call this ambition gap. The ambition gap is the difference between the megawatts, gigawatts on the system required to meet clean energy goals as a sum of corporate and government goals and the amount of gigawatts that governments prepare to support underpin by consumer bills. Okay, there’s a gap.

and you can measure it and it’s been in the, I’d say hundreds of gigawatts across Europe. That gap has been filled by corporates to some extent. Now that gap is increasing because we’re increasing power demands. Back to my power demand point. That ambition gap is increasing. And so the market is and will need to evolve. And we want to be at the heart of that revolution, which is that dedicated business model to say, government, you’re not the only ones on the hook here.

Adam Sroka (20:55)
Yeah.

Ilesh Patel (21:07)
We think there’s great companies as long as we can competitively price power that are prepared to buy energy on long-term basis from very mature technologies like wind, solar and battery. Pick your customers, pick your future. So you need to the right customers in that. It needs to be at scale. The timing and contractual arrangements need to be simplified for sure, because part of what you alluded to, Adam, was how complex is the market. It has been complex for corporates to get their head around.

Adam Sroka (21:33)
Mm-hmm.

Ilesh Patel (21:33)
role for

technology in this as well. You know, there are a number of good tech, you know, companies that trying to almost intermediate this marketplace. You know, I think there’s room to move there and do better in that as well to get technology in the mix here for how do you matchmake properly in this. So I’d say the market needs to evolve because it’s always existed, but it’s been clunky. it needs to be simplified and it needs to focus on what customer wants so that this larger ambition gap as we’ve grown powered them all over the next few years.

gets fueled by corporates rather than underpinned by consumers.

Adam Sroka (22:03)
And so why have traditional utilities not hoovered this up? What makes the energy requirements so different for these consumers?

Ilesh Patel (22:14)
And I’m struggling and I go back to my great ideas, great execution as it were, this idea is not new. They could have invented it themselves. Two observations I had is there was a period of time in European power markets, particularly for renewables, where very attractive government contracts and rightly the evolution of the industry, they were suitable for the industry, were available. And it was tough to get them.

But you knew that it was a linear process, right? You go and bid in for a government auction, you got to order the contract, you go build your project, you find a investor. Great. Okay. Very, very simple. Corporate view is just harder. You know, it involves a lot of footwork of going to meet customers all the time. You know, this is, we’re going to describe it to someone is if you had a wholesale model, you know, you used open reach earlier, So wholesale to, you know, your customers is open reach, right? Wholesale bandwidth and broadband bandwidth, right? Great. That’s very different from sitting in VM02 and trying to sell, you know,

Adam Sroka (23:07)
you

Ilesh Patel (23:08)
broadband services, right? Big B2B customers, right? You need people on the ground who are talking to customers all the time. It’s a very different model from the old traditional development model. Utilities, one would think would be good at it, but again, they’ve got different priorities, right? And quite rightly, they’ve got service customers on B2C side, they’ve got to service multiple solutions, customers are complex around the spectrum. They’ve got billing and metering to deal with, they’ve got new tech to deal with, optimization, trading. One wonders whether it’s just not core for them. This is just not important.

Adam Sroka (23:37)
Hmm.

Ilesh Patel (23:37)
for them to focus on, where I think therefore there’s a gap in the market. There’s just white space here, which I think actually, this is great white space that somebody else could fill and we filled it, I think, and hoping to fill more of it.

Adam Sroka (23:50)
I like, mean, this is a joke, but I realize there’s probably some truth in it, but going and speaking to customers, that’s a business model only a consultant could love.

Ilesh Patel (24:00)
Yeah, I’m so glad you said that. I used to this rule when I was in consulting that all customers would get a response from me in one minute. And most of the customers used to WhatsApp me. I used to have a CFO of the big UK utilities to just joke with me on WhatsApp saying, well, that was a 30 second response time. I later than a minute, he’d rip me for it. Because that whole customer service mindset is so ingrained in consultants. You’re spot on, Adam.

Adam Sroka (24:21)
Yeah, yeah.

Ilesh Patel (24:29)
I’m sure you felt it as well. Your desire to do well for the customer because they’re the one paying you overrides almost anything that you might be thinking about that time, including having a cup of tea. just thought, a customer’s email, great.

Adam Sroka (24:43)
And it’s hilarious when you meet people that haven’t had the consulting experience, haven’t got the scars, and they almost seem allergic to going and talking to their customers and the people that they actually serve. They’re not up for it at all.

Ilesh Patel (24:53)
Yeah, yes, honestly, go wrong,

right? I mean, I’ve got loads of examples where I just got the judgment of the customer wrong. I didn’t build a good relationship or I made a mistake. You make mistakes along that journey, right? That’s the reality of customer service. You’re not going to get it right every single time. What you learn from it is far more important than the mistake you made, for sure, which I learned a lot of lessons in building a consulting business, for sure. But I don’t think the ingrained DNA bit of it leaves you,

The only thing I’d say in the customer service business and kind of advisory into building and building this, which is trying to serve customers. You can go too far sometimes in the customer service. Sometimes you’ve got the other customer. No, that doesn’t work. Okay. And as a consultant, I think I didn’t say no often enough, but I’m probably carrying a little bit over, which is I just need to say no more. It doesn’t work. We can’t do that. Okay. Here’s what we can do, but we can’t do this.

Adam Sroka (25:44)
Yeah.

Ilesh Patel (25:47)
Whereas I still got a bit of a DNA hangover of, yeah, you can have anything you want.

Adam Sroka (25:48)
Yeah.

Yeah, like some ideas are bad ideas, matter what the kind of price point is like. But yeah, it’s hard. It’s a hard thing to pick up and navigate. I am definitely guilty of it as well.

Ilesh Patel (26:01)
Yeah, the other thing that you haven’t

mentioned that you learned as a consultant, which I’m sure you spent lots of time reflecting on is problem solving. There’s a real problem solving DNA bit that you learn as an advisor, which is because you get very vague customer requirements or you’ve got a really gnarly delivery challenge. And what you learn is a bit of instinct helps and experience.

Adam Sroka (26:10)
Yeah.

Ilesh Patel (26:28)
done it so many times, seen it many times that your just instinct kicks in. But the other is just a really structured problem solving process, which you realize that a lot of people sitting in utilities developers don’t have because they see their businesses linear. Okay. They see if I just follow these steps, okay, I’ll get there. I’ve just seen everything as nonlinear. Okay. I might start at the end first and go back to the beginning. Okay. Because that’s a better way to solve the problem than it is to just follow the process as it were.

And that’s a real mindset cultural difference between people who’ve spent time on the customer service side and in advisory businesses versus those that have grown up in huge amazing businesses that build things at scale and to high quality, but can’t often get into the problem solving mindset.

Adam Sroka (27:08)
And danger going right on a tangent about consulting, but I think it’s good fun. Like I had a customer who had a really gnarly logistics management system that they’d kind of built internally and they wanted to pick some stuff out of it. And I had teams of experts on there and I was saying, right, we can do this. We do that. Here’s how I break it down. And I teams of very senior, very clever people saying, no, no, no, we have been told that this can’t be solved. This can’t be done. ⁓ This system’s too complicated. I’ll just said to them,

Ilesh Patel (27:18)
and

Adam Sroka (27:37)
Did a human build it? Did we inherit it from the gods? How did you come about this infinitely complicated system? And it gets into, you talk to techies and you’re like, can I have an estimate on, I can’t estimate that, it’s too long. was like, is it gonna be a billion years? No, right, you’ve just given me an estimate. It’s not a good one. We can make some bounds on things. And I think it’s that being a bit pushy and that getting to…

Ilesh Patel (27:39)
That’s right.

Yes.

Adam Sroka (28:05)
let’s solve a subset of the problem and we’ll have learned something about the wider system that we’re in.

Ilesh Patel (28:11)
What you’ve just done

is the classic problem solving mindset. And it took me a while to learn it properly. And I had some good coaching on it during my time at Brunga, which is just to ask great questions. Just ask some great questions, two or three at most. Get you all the insight you need to say, OK, I think based on your answer to that, here’s a way you might want to be thinking about it. It’s just a fundamentally different approach to asking great questions about saying,

the slightly computer says no mindset, right? When you come from the linear piece of or the linear way of thinking.

Adam Sroka (28:43)
How do we get to a point where we learn more and take a wiser view on the situation?

Ilesh Patel (28:48)
Yeah,

and the risk of tangent once more, you know, there’s always a risk in consulting, which I’m sure you found as well, right? That you try to be the cleverest person in room, clever is wrong word, the most knowledgeable person. I just know more about everything than you. You just never will. There’s always someone smart. There’s always someone who knows more about that topic, right? So being having some knowledge, does good questions, right? It’s just so much more powerful.

Adam Sroka (29:03)
No.

Yeah. And then my answer to that is, know, and I will shut up about consulting in a second, but my answer to that, like, and I try and instill this in our team in that they are very nervous. It’s like, well, I don’t know that technology. I don’t know that domain inside out. And I said, we’re not selling the thing that you know. Like we are, and this is more entrepreneurialism, I think, but, but it’s not, can I solve the problem today? It’s can everyone I’ve ever met,

within that group of people have they got the capacity to solve the problem because I bet if literally anyone I have ever met if I offered them 10 grand a day rate they’d probably take some time off their work and chip into the project.

Ilesh Patel (29:48)
Okay,

it’s such a good point. And I’ll bring it back to egg power now. You know, one of the principles I’ve had in the business, which I could have, it’s a complete non tangent, it’s completely exactly pick up what he said, which is, I had a choice when I was thinking about who do I bring in to help me with this business? Okay, do I go and put a job advert out there saying I want an amazing investment director or an amazing construction director? And I didn’t.

Adam Sroka (29:53)
Yes.

Ilesh Patel (30:14)
What I did is I went back through my network. said, who have I worked with over the last 25 odd years that I think would just be amazing at doing that with me? And I just went to them and I hired them. I completely stretched the Liberty Global HR model to do it, which I continually get ribbed about by our HR team, Liberty Global. But I just took the view that not just people I know, it’s not just mates of

Adam Sroka (30:24)
Hmm.

Ilesh Patel (30:40)
the village as it were. These are people that I thought, you’re going to be amazing at that because I’ve seen you be amazing at that. And that is a big thing I need. Okay, great. Why don’t you come on board and then let me persuade you to come on board, by the way, on this risky venture, you know, setting aside a big corporate, which was a task at its own right. But I picked talent on that basis. And look, that will evolve over time. But it was such a great feeling to have people who felt like they were coming on board because I’d asked them to.

Adam Sroka (30:45)
Yeah.

Ilesh Patel (31:08)
And because they knew what they were coming to help with, then let alone the vision of the company and all that stuff, which is all great, right? But it’s like, yeah, great. I can see exactly how I fit into this puzzle of what we’re going to build together. And I mean, you’re offering me a great opportunity to do that. So that talent picking thing is such an important part of the building businesses and has been a part of their power as well.

Adam Sroka (31:29)
And like, love that. There’s someone that’s been with us for a while, like one of our, in fact, yeah, oldest member of staff. And she often, like, she’s changed roles a fair bit. And she, she often says to me, and it’s huge praise, like, I love it. says, I feel like I’m hypercube shaped. Like, it doesn’t really matter what role you give me. I’m hypercube shaped. And like, exactly. Yeah, that’s what we want. And like, on the talent piece, like it is so important. I often say, I every other podcast that like the tech’s the easy bit, the people’s the hard bit. But

Ilesh Patel (31:47)
Yeah, subscribe.

Adam Sroka (31:58)
How do you, because you’re bumping into like behind the meter, storage, solar, like all this different stuff. Quite, how do you get that across to your customers and like how are you learning about how to communicate the value that you’re bringing to people that maybe don’t live and breathe energy like you do?

Ilesh Patel (32:15)
I mean, is spot. Yeah. And behind the meters is the hardest one for that, to be fair. You you’ve got a disparate set of corporate, sometimes single site customers. When I was working with our ex solution business, that’s about the rooftop solar business. know, had B &Q as a big customer. We’re also dealing with, you know, kind of hairdressers on the high street. Yeah. How do you describe clean energy delivered at scale on your roof with a battery and a business case for that? But we’re financing it. Don’t worry about it. mean, oh, it’s…

Adam Sroka (32:35)
Yes.

Ilesh Patel (32:44)
So actually, mean, look, in our world, I think I moved into a very simple thing. Large scale renewables are really, really important. There’ll be the bulk of what we do and the bulk of what the industry should do. There’s a really important role for distributed energy behind the meter, but it is complex and there are a whole range of trade-offs and there is no easy product out there for this technology. So, solar and battery, clearly we do work by the way. I don’t mean that as the product. I mean, how do you frame it from a customer point of view?

You’ve got the customer requirements are so varied, power density versus land availability, integration with operational facilities, how do you get access to the site, how do you access the roof, how do know that someone steps on the roof and their foot’s not going to go through it, disruption to business continuity when you make the installation of a solar battery project or in some cases other technology, how do you finance it, how long do you structure this contract so that you can repay yourself and deliver a benefit to the customer, because the customer

Some customers don’t know they’re going be in business in five years time. I think there’s such huge diversity. The only clarity I think you can introduce to that is simplify that into one or two products that customers can understand and try to take the complexity away from them. But that requires a huge amount of trust, which is not easy to build in our industry, particularly for behind the media customers. And then the second bit of it is to recognize that…

Adam Sroka (33:43)
Yeah.

Ilesh Patel (34:04)
The distributor energy revolution has gone well from a consumer perspective on a B2C side. I’ve got solar rooftop on my roof. I’m sure others have, you it works well, you know, but there’s still a trust issue fundamentally around that. Businesses and companies are key to getting more deployed, but they’re nervous because it’s probably number 45 on their priority list. They don’t even get around to it. It’s like, yeah, it’s kind of interesting unless they’re really energy intensive. And I think part of the

Adam Sroka (34:25)
Yeah.

Ilesh Patel (34:32)
My answer to that is, let’s start with those people that where energy is really important to them. It’s a big part of their cost space. They’ve got people who understand the problem you’re trying to solve for them and they can engage with the insensible level. If you’re trying to sell this to the local shop, you’re going to struggle. It’s just not a never-arity list.

Deal with that later. You need to help that customer ultimately, but you don’t need to help them now. You’ve got two or three years of runway to help some of the biggest power consumers in the UK. That’s going to help them.

Adam Sroka (35:06)
Yeah, I think for me, like data centers is a great example where it’s like a well understood space that everyone just knows effectively it just becomes down to energy costs. That’s like, that’s the whole business model. Like there’s some other stuff, but.

Ilesh Patel (35:17)
If a grid scale, think that’s true

behind the meters, much harder for them. mean, I’ve tried to build private wire into data centers from an adjacent piece of land. get into a load of issues around, which I don’t fully understand, but I know, I know colleagues do, you know, around availability, disruption to the data center, which doesn’t, can’t be disrupted as you know, right? I don’t mean like, you probably know more than I do, right? About disruption capabilities, engineering integration. get, you get into a bunch of roadblocks that you never thought you’d have. You thought this is really obvious, right? It was going to give you clean, cheap power.

Adam Sroka (35:20)
Yeah.

Ilesh Patel (35:46)
We’re going to save you some grid costs as well, right? By the way, isn’t this a great deal for you? The answer is no. Because you’re about to wipe out our data center and reduce our availability risk or increase our availability risk, right? From 99.999%, right? Down to 98%. Sorry. That’s not going to work. You suddenly get a bunch of roadblocks. Okay. Well, okay. Well, better start again then. Okay. How do we solve that problem?

Adam Sroka (36:02)
Yeah.

diesel generators usually, unfortunately.

Ilesh Patel (36:09)
Yeah,

I think diesel generators have been an incredibly efficient solution, long as they’re never used. So no one minds a diesel generator that’s never used, Apart from the fact you have to test it from time to time, right? But it sits there as backup. It’s great. But what happens when you do use it? Yeah, it’s not a great technology for the environment.

Adam Sroka (36:16)
Yeah, yeah.

I suppose like you touched on this a little bit because our idea how do you sell it to the main street businesses, right? And how do you bring them on the education journey? But I think it gets worse when you get into more technical stuff and you’ve expressed in the past like frustration with over engineered, poorly explained energy technology. What are companies getting wrong? What can they learn? What should they do better?

Ilesh Patel (36:52)
There’s two parts of tech there. I’m interested in your view how you define tech because tech, my natural instinct always goes to large scale solar renewables, Kind of in hydrogen, VCS, right? And of course, tech is much more than that as you know, and hypercube knows all too well, because technology encompasses software, digital, et cetera. Things are really, really important. But the articulation, I think, becomes really, really simple when you’re talking about

physical tech, I can describe it as that. Because There’s only really three things in the energy transition that customers are interested in. Help me use less energy. Help me reduce the cost of the energy I do use. Or help me to meet my clean energy goals and if energy tech doesn’t meet at least one of those goals ideally more, and can’t be explained simply and clearly to a non-energy expert how it does meet that goal, I can’t advise going back to the drawing board.

⁓ And helping, kind of always say helping someone get what they want is easier than changing what they want. Those three things are kind of what they want, right? Use less energy, pay less for the energy I do use and yeah, sure, clean energy. Great, fantastic. Yeah, I like that as well. And give me some combination of all three of those if you can. And that’s where you get, I think the kind of hearts and minds pieces over the line and before you get all the complexity.

Adam Sroka (37:56)
Yeah, yeah.

There’s parallels in them like it’s funny people say tech and I think databases and like cloud platforms and stuff. It’s funny the in in like building digital solutions, I always say that No one cares if your solution is ten times better than what was there previously if it’s Harder to use even slightly harder to use or you introduce a minor inconvenience into the workflow I give you three months and then we back to the spreadsheets and the manual process they use

Ilesh Patel (38:18)
Yeah. ⁓

Adam Sroka (38:43)
for because something will have frustrated them away from your solution. And it’s exactly that. Give me the answers I want, but make it easy for me to consume and use and don’t disrupt me too much.

Ilesh Patel (38:53)
What a great example.

I don’t know if you know actually, I think I said in my intro, I actually spent five years with Infosys, a big technology company. I ran their European energy utilities businesses. And whilst I was no tech expert in the more traditional sense, you just got to see that life. We were creating software products for companies through over-engineered products, which the customer, these are big utilities, big energy companies. Why do you need that?

And they didn’t even do the answers. Sometimes you just spec it because, oh, it sounded like a spec we should have in there, right? We threw it in. Or you’d wait till it was perfectly tested before you ship it to the customer to go and test, right? Whereas if you shipped it three weeks ago, at a really early stage, then they told you, yeah, I’m not sure I like that. If you just did this to it, you’d have said to yourself, three weeks of work, the customer will have cost of doing it, and it’d be the better product at the end of it, right? And I think there’s a real analogy between the…

Adam Sroka (39:24)
Yeah.

Ilesh Patel (39:52)
what I call the digital tech world as it were, software engineering databases, and visit it, is exactly the same applies. Ship it early, test it with the customer early, is this going to work? And we do exactly the same with our projects. We share with some of the tech majors or our big customers in telco. We share a really early view. We think it’s this project over here. Here’s some of the details of it. It’s not fully baked yet, and we don’t own it yet, but we think this is the one that’s going to suit you. What do you think? Does this work for you?

And testing early just feels like exactly the right way to early, because the customers will give you real-time feedback.

Adam Sroka (40:25)
And it’s that you’ve touched on, like, I think it’s that desire, democratic design where they’ve gone, right, let’s ask everyone in the whole business what they think the product should do. And all of a sudden you’ve got 15 tabs and a thousand buttons. And actually the person that’s going to use it day in, day out uses four buttons and they really want it to just do this one thing. in the adoption piece, actually what you’re talking about, like getting the consumer, the end user involved in the design, they actually feel like they own it.

more. They are driven to use it because they’re proud of it.

Ilesh Patel (40:59)
It’s a shared sense of solution. ⁓ They built it together. Wow, we built this together. Yeah, you absolutely listened to me. And not only did you ship something that I really wanted or I gave them a solar wind project that they really wanted and felt, but they’re really proud of it because they co-created it. A co-creation piece is incredible, incredibly powerful customers.

Adam Sroka (41:19)
So like on the wider picture, where do you think the demand, corporate demand for clean energy and clean power is going to head over the next few years?

Ilesh Patel (41:29)
Well, no surprise, I’m going say it’s going to be absolutely massive. It’s going to grow. You know, it’s ambition got like, it’s hard to tell. Honestly, it was a really tough year in 2025 with the corporate PPO market, by the way. mean, if you just trawled in, there weren’t that many deals done. The ones that were done were really forced over the line. We’re kind of in this weird space on this, beyond this ambition gap, which is fundamentals. That’s just fundamentals. Fundamentals on the right direction. But we’re in this weird space on power pricing, corporate commitment to ESG goals.

the role of government and CP35 in the UK but also across Europe as well, the complexity of the industry that I think the market will continue to be as large as it has been historically which is in for the UK you know a certain minimum of a couple of gigawatts a year projects that get contracted on a corporate via probably more actually and that we don’t see. The big question is how quickly it’s going to grow and who’s going to drive that industry leadership.

think in that context, the ambition gap. Because fundamentals are in the right direction around the need. Some of the biggest buyers are driving towards continued growth in there to meet that rising power demand. So fundamentals are great. We just want to make sure we’re there. Because being there for your customers, getting them over the line is so important.

One of the really helpful things I don’t know where you picked up on it is that governments just launched a consultation on corporate PPAs for large consumers. That’s kind of important. It’s a kind of important consultation to have. I actually think they framed the question slightly in a way I wouldn’t have done. They framed it around market complexity, which I think is true, but that should be for the industry to solve rather than government. I don’t think it’s a public policy failure. I don’t think it’s a market gap, if you sort of be that government needs to step into. might be, but one of the ideas that they haven’t…

Adam Sroka (43:08)
Yeah.

Ilesh Patel (43:12)
considered, which I’ve been thinking about for a long time. And it’s very UK specific. So we are in the UK. So I’ll make it UK specific. At the moment, we as a consumer and all consumers pay a CFD levy, which essentially pays for the difference between power price and the CFD contracts. I mean, struck by government over the last 15 years, actually 14 years now. That’s a levy which is bounced around over time, but it’s substantial. It’s five or six pounds of power hour, let’s say. It’s quite a substantial part of your energy bill.

and certainly it’s for large corporates. My view has been actually that if you really want to take one measure, if you’re just going to do one thing that transforms the landscape for corporate buyers, remove the CFD levy from corporate buyers for any new megawatts that they sign with new renewable energy installations going forward. I think they should fairly probably have to contribute, although you could debate this, think, for sure. And I would contribute to some of the historic costs because they already sunk.

But what that should do is give government signal very clearly that they can buy a little less because the other part of the market, the corporate market, has stepped up. Therefore, the overall bill to consumers, not changed at all. It’s just been swapped out. And then the incentive for the corporate becomes incredible, of course, because they’re avoiding some of the costs that they’re not creating. In fact, they’re helping towards avoiding for consumers. Great. Such a simple little instrument to do.

Adam Sroka (44:20)
Yeah.

Ilesh Patel (44:38)
know, implementation complexity aside, you know, it feels like a really easy way to kickstart the corporate PBA market for the next wave of growth in the face of this rising power demand that we want the big tech digital infrastructure companies to help solve.

Adam Sroka (44:51)
Yeah, I think that’s really interesting as well because there’s like a second order effect of, and I’m making wide sweeping assumptions here, but on the whole I imagine the corporate PPAs are going to be signed with

energy sources that are probably more respectful of the transmission problem we’ve got and like a little bit more local, a little bit easier to be respectful of the kind of the huge headaches we’ve got with like all the energy up in Scotland and not in London and all that stuff, which you can’t solve on a grand like whole system scale. You have to be in the weeds of my specific demand, my specific needs.

Ilesh Patel (45:25)
Yeah, I think

that’s spot on. I don’t know whether that is going to be true, whether it will drive more localized power or not just by virtue of the market existing. What I do know is true is that some of the really big tech and corporates are thinking about the location of how they buy for sure. They’re thinking about where the power is, not just the solar wind, not just the size of it. They’re thinking about, is it near London? Is it near Cambridge? Is it in Cornwall? They are thinking about it.

Adam Sroka (45:31)
Hmm.

Ilesh Patel (45:53)
The thing about what time of day it produces well and the impact on the system overall. I think that’s exactly the right way to think about it. And leaving it to the corporates to solve is probably the right answer because the market will give them the signals they need to go and figure out what the right answer is. know, and rightly or wrongly, having spent 25 years in liberalised energy markets now, you know, I’m still a believer that there is power in the market signal. Right. And if, and if you don’t believe that, well, get rid of it. Okay. Let government take over or some other body take over. But you’ve got a market.

let it make sure it’s efficient, gives the right signals and let it go and do its job.

Adam Sroka (46:23)
Nice job.

All right, well, but I can’t let you leave without asking about AI. What do you think work? How’s AI playing a role in anything you do or in the future? Not just in creating loads of demand, but in actually being useful to the system.

Ilesh Patel (46:33)
Oh, I love that. I knew

you were going to ask me something about AI, a topic on which I know very, very little. Apart from the fact I am using a version of AI now, and it was incredible, by the way, for creating a model, which I can delete. They created me a solar battery optimization model in about eight minutes.

Adam Sroka (46:55)
I’ve got the so yeah on that vein I can go first I was surprised I use all like all the major ones I use quite a lot of them as you could probably imagine and I was pilling around in chat gbt and I can’t remember what I was asking here but I had like five or six files and excel things I wanted it to think about and like write a one page run and maybe do a small analysis on and I’m used to talking to it

telling it what I want to do. And then I’ll feed it in file at a time, right? Here’s this, here’s what this one falls about. And like a few weeks ago, model upgrade has come along. This is in chat GPT. And I did my usual, right? Here’s the thing I’m trying to do. These are the files I’m after. This is what the data sets look like. Right, how should we start? And it said, and I was gobsmacked that it worked. It said, just upload a zip with all the files in and I’ll do the rest. And I was like, no, it doesn’t work.

And I zipped to like probably about seven or eight files together. put it into the one chat, press enter and unzip them, rattle the Python on it, spout out everything I needed. And I’m like, I know it can do all the individual steps. I was just very impressed that it was like, just zip it up and fire it at me and I’ll figure it out. Like it’s getting so clever.

Ilesh Patel (48:08)
Yeah, same example.

I put it in the copilot. And we used copilot in the Big Global. I just said, can you please build me a battery storage model that optimizes solar production with battery storage on an hourly basis for one year.

Make sure you respect the constraints of the battery and allow me to input those variables. I put a few more instructions there. Eight minutes later, I’ve got something that was, okay, it wasn’t perfect, but it was workable. Right? Well, I haven’t got to yet, which I think is the real challenge is how do you then, how do you feed it back in again? You what do need to go and do again to get to something that is really workable and usable? But I fear for the graduates out there if that really starts to work, right? Because of course, how do they learn?

Adam Sroka (48:34)
Yeah.

Nah.

Ilesh Patel (48:51)
You can just feed it into a copilot.

Adam Sroka (48:52)
There was a paper recently, I can’t remember the name of it now, talking about that already the science proves that we are farming out too much of our cognitive thinking to these things and there’s an immediate decline going on.

Ilesh Patel (49:03)
Well, I didn’t just like just on AI. think you’ve had some amazing people in the IPCube over the last year or so. came back to some of the podcasts you can speak for more eloquently on AI technology, distributed energy generation and some great podcasts there that I certainly some others have as well. I’d say for my business, I think there’s probably just four things because I’m quite physical business. Go and look at my pictures of Rag Lane on LinkedIn. By the way, you’ll see how physical it is and my muddy boots. But drone inspections.

remote drone inspections, just such an important part of it. And I don’t think anyone’s really cracked this yet of getting it really, really nice and slick. Performance optimization of the outside. Yeah, exactly. Optimization challenges of the physical site, the quality of power coming out of it, know, proactive maintenance. Those are things that have been talked about for 20 years and we still don’t have it right.

Adam Sroka (49:40)
Really messy. ⁓

Ilesh Patel (49:55)
Surely AI is going to bring this to the fore now, right? And I have asked to really crack some of these challenges around operating physical assets to the right level of their capabilities. And tech and digital is the only way to do that. There’s not much you can improve on the physical infrastructure, right? We got pretty good at building that stuff now, right? So tech and AI has got to be the way to do it.

Adam Sroka (50:17)
And that’s like, didn’t even pay you to say that, but that’s where I cut my teeth in energy was on optimization. My PhD was optimization. I like, I don’t often do this, but I will plug services if anybody’s struggling with optimizing physical assets, let’s have a chat. But it baffles me that.

Ilesh Patel (50:32)
Come and talk to me

when mine are operational. It’s about another year away, But we’ll be happy to come and talk to you about coming to optimize our assets because they’ll need some optimization.

Adam Sroka (50:43)
It baffles me that for the scale of investment on the physical asset, like 100 million pound, nice nine figure sum on some of these assets like wouldn’t classes, right? And then like, what they’ve got like 30 or 40 pounds to spend on the digital or the software side, like the asymmetry is bonkers.

Ilesh Patel (51:01)
It’s going. Yeah, I spent £65,000 moving a pair of great question you to one of my projects 100 meters away because they were in mating season. So yeah, it’s not even the widgets. don’t mean to say sometimes spending more money on very, very important, absolutely essential. But yeah, spending some more money on tech should go alongside that for sure.

Adam Sroka (51:14)
It’s the juice.

Well, I’ve plugged my business, it feels only fair to give you the opportunity. And I never let anyone leave without asking this question. If there’s anything you’d like to promote or plug, or if people want to find out more about you or Liberty or Egg, where should we direct them?

Ilesh Patel (51:37)
Ah, well, send them to me and I’ll refuse to plug, but very kind of you. I think I’ve plugged enough all the way through around my vision and what we’re trying to build here. I’m a complete energy geek, so I’d love to hear from many of those industry experts out here. you know, certainly in the vein of what got me and us here won’t get us there. So continuous learning is to be my mantra for a while now.

Adam Sroka (51:58)
Well, Ilesh, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been a really good conversation and I hope the audience enjoyed it as much as I did. Look forward to seeing what you get up to and all the best.

Ilesh Patel (52:04)
I really appreciate it.

Amazing, brilliant, thank you so much.

Adam Sroka (52:13)
Thank you once again for listening to the Hypercube Energy podcast. As always, if you have any feedback or comments or you want to get involved, please get in touch. And if you want to find out more about what’s happening in data and AI across the energy sector, please join the Beyond Energy community and I look forward to speaking to you soon.