Connor Galbraith (00:02) We’re in this inflection point, I think over the last 5 years and certainly for the next 5, where the pace of renewable energy is creating the sort of volatility in the market that is not only presenting a great commercial opportunity for BESS asset owners and operators, as you’re seeing with the rollout and the pipeline that we’ve got, particularly in the UK, but also for

being able to provide for energy security

Adam Sroka (00:51) Hello and welcome to season 2 of the Hypercube Podcast. We are going to kick off the new season with a bit of a review of 2024 and some of the stuff that happened in the energy sector and not doing it alone. I’m joined today by the lovely Connor and Cynthia, would you like to introduce yourselves?

Cynthia Grainger (01:15) Hi, my name is Cynthia Grainger. I’ve been at Hypercube for about 7 months and I’m a Commercial Manager here. I’ve come in a lot to deal with batteries. I’ve got about 23 years experience in the energy sector and of which of that 5 have been in batteries. So, yeah, nice to meet you all and be an exciting view of what happened in 2024 because I think it was quite an exciting year for energy.

Connor Galbraith (01:40) Yeah, thanks Adam, I’m Connor. I’ve been at Hypercube since last summer as well. I’m a Senior Data Engineer, but my main, my background mainly has been in energy, machine learning, AI, originally aerospace engineering, but you never know what happens. And yeah, looking forward to kicking off season 2.

Adam Sroka (01:59) Very good. So we’ll start with the big one then. Biggest trends, biggest shifts in renewable energy last year.

Cynthia Grainger (02:07) For me the biggest one, obviously being in energy for 20 or so years, is the fact that the last coal station was closed in 2024, a huge development and I think it’s a view of, you know, how the UK wants to do things and how we’re progressing through the net zero transition and journey we’re going through.

Connor Galbraith (02:30) Yeah, I’ll definitely add to that in the sense that it was only back in 2013 where we were getting upwards of, what was it, a third of our electricity in 2013 from coal. And for that to go down to zero in just over 10 years is very, very impressive. And I think we shouldn’t undersell just how massive an achievement that is for the UK market and the power of

regulatory incentives like the carbon price floor and the government stepping in in 2014 to stop new coal plants being built. This is an example of how good interventions can actually help push the energy transition forward.

Adam Sroka (03:14) Really exciting and it’s interesting to see like what’s happening to some of those old coal sites now. We’ve had a long enough sort of period of time to see some interesting stuff happen with yeah disused coal stations.

I think for me, anecdotally more than anything else, everyone’s quite buzzy about batteries all over the world, not just in the UK. But you’re seeing that grow. Some more manufacturers coming online in the East. You’ve got some of the markets in other territories outside of GB really opening up. So it’s an exciting time.

Connor Galbraith (03:48) Yeah, absolutely. I I think We’re in this inflection point, I think over the last 5 years and certainly for the next 5, where the pace of renewable energy is creating the sort of volatility in the market that is not only presenting a great commercial opportunity for BESS asset owners and operators, as you’re seeing with the rollout and the pipeline that we’ve got, particularly in the UK, but also for

being able to provide for energy security

as you get more things like dunkelflaute where you get large drops in wind supply in a very short space of time. Having that capacity to ramp up quickly in those instances is not just a commercial opportunity, but it’s necessary for the image of the clean energy transition as being good for energy security

to actually materialise. And I think we are seeing that in spades with the number of interconnector trips we’ve had this year in particular.

Cynthia Grainger (04:57) Yeah, I mean, for me as well, know, sort of starting in this world of batteries 5 years ago, when I was working more on the demand side stuff, it’s like, batteries are very expensive, where’s the revenue coming from? And if you look at 5 years now, before I started, it’s now agrees and everyone knows that because we’ve got more intermittent generation, I think in 2024, 50.10% of our energy was from renewables that we need support from

batteries to support that. So, you know, from a 5 year view of what is this project, it’s too expensive to actually it’s supporting the whole network in the UK, and all sorts of new revenues, opportunities come up in that time that are specifically there for the likes of batteries and you know, fast reactive technologies.

Connor Galbraith (05:52) Not to mention as well, the UK energy market is, I mean, let’s not beat around the bush. It’s not simple. It’s really complicated. There’s 12, 13 different avenues you can make revenue out of it. And that is also attractive for owners and operators where there’s that inefficiency to take advantage of.

Adam Sroka (06:13) I mean, it keeps us in plenty of work. It’s my favorite soapbox to stand on as well. But I think despite the complexity and the uptick of new technologies like how much more difficult batteries are to manage and optimise compared to other asset classes, it feels like from what we see, the industry is only really scratching the surface of what can be done on a software side like getting the optimal performance

out of the kit and there’s a long way to go actually in lot of cases not just by individual asset owner operators but actually by the market and the operator themselves like there’s a hell of a lot going on and we’re just at the start of quite a big journey where there’s edge to be found and like marginal improvements to be gained by just doing more clever stuff with the kit we already have.

Cynthia Grainger (07:05) You know, we’ve gone through the journey of accepting that the batteries are needed and how they work. And now the next step is actually how we need the data for it to be able to really understand it is the step that we’re going into. And that’s why Hypercube probably was created, right?

Adam Sroka (07:18) Mm-hmm.

The thing I like as well, like, but yeah, you’re right. It’s kind of that was the big bet for for why we’re doing this. But everyone so interestingly, right, everyone’s so like engrossed in the here and now and trying to do the best like in the current market conditions. And it’s actually as Connor said, so complicated to understand. It’s really hard work. Very little work I’ve seen done

across research, across organisations, looking holistically at batteries over longer periods of time and actually going back through old datasets to see are there new insights to be gleaned or new trends. Not a lot of scenario planning and what ifs and stuff going on from anecdotally what I’ve experienced in the kind of research that I’ve done, which is a massive untapped vein of opportunity for people

to start driving more edge so if anyone wants to to engage with us to do that I’d love to do some of that stuff, that’d be great fun.

Connor Galbraith (08:24) I think if I put my machine learning hat on for a moment, I would probably say that there is definitely a lot of untapped potential there, but with the new market effectively being introduced every single year, the strategies and actions that worked even 12 months ago probably won’t work today. And that does make digging back into history

much harder than it sounds. Not that there isn’t value there, of course, but just being nimble when forecasting into the future. We just had a quick reserve launch on December 3rd. That doesn’t mean that’s going to be the last market change through to 2030. And so long as investors and operators are conscious that things can change with very little notice in this world, then…

they’ll stand to benefit from from staying flexible.

Adam Sroka (09:25) And that’s the thing, this is a complex system of markets and sort of revenue potential. Even the smallest, seemingly smallest change can just banjax everything else because you get cascading changes through it that are difficult to understand in advance and you just need to see how it kind of plays out. So no, totally agree staying nimble and flexible and being able to adapt quickly to those changing conditions.

We’ve talked a bit about trends and batteries quite a lot there. Connor said the R word and I’m interested to know, yeah, people’s thoughts on the sort of major regulatory changes that happened last year and kind of what impact you think they will have.

Cynthia Grainger (10:04) I think for me it was interesting to see that capacity market, which is obviously a what we call floor price revenue for batteries because you’re paid to be available and it’s a certain amount per new build per 15 years, actually start changing their rules to take into account batteries. So for example, now as of I think it was

August last year, they are taking into account degradation. Over a 15 year period, you don’t need to say, right, my battery is 2 megawatts, but it’s going to degrade to 0.5 megawatts. You can actually keep that 2 megawatts and show the degradation. So yeah, I think that that’s I still think the

rating on batteries for capacity markets still need to be looked at. But it’s a step in the right direction. And I also think that this sort of British energy, NESO and so on, I think they’re all going to bring some more opportunities for revenues for assets such as batteries.

Connor Galbraith (11:24) Yeah, there’s a smörgåsbord this year. So we had obviously the change of government in the summer

and the long-awaited GB Energy, which currently is sitting pretty in the committee stage in the House of Lords, so these things take time as with anything, but having committed to invest about £8.5 billion over the course of this Parliament through to 2029, in combination with the similar or slightly less amount that might afford energy projects from the Sovereign Wealth Fund.

This concept of crowding in private investment to both mature renewable technologies and those that maybe need a little bit of a push, long duration storage being one of them. You’ve also seen another instrument in the form of the cap and floor scheme, which is basically a CfD, but instead of having a single price, you have a band between which revenues can fall. And I think this is going to mark a massive inflection point in terms of the

state actually taking control of its legal mandates for decarbonisation because until now there’s been very much an approach of just well the market will figure it out. We’re legally held to it but we’re not going to do anything about it. Massive changes. Others have included yes some subtler ones that have fallen under the radar like the Crown Estate which owns basically all of the seabed around the UK including all the offshore

and the land on which all the offshore wind farms sit, that entity is now allowed to borrow money to leverage its investments. This is going to be very important for delivering on things like clearing way for the ScotWind auction that cleared last year to great fanfare. And I think there’s a lot of new technologies

that are going to see the light of day because of this, that otherwise just would never be economically competitive as prices keep getting cannibalised by increasing zero marginal cost renewables. So it’s a very exciting time.

Cynthia Grainger (13:37) And then we’ve also seen the connection reform. So obviously lots of assets want to come on and there’s been a delay of the grid connection. I heard people talk about 2036, which seems very long away and that should help some of the opportunities, not just for batteries but for solar and so on as well. I think it could, the sort of momentum of that could go a bit faster,

but we’re getting there and I think it slowed down a little bit with the government change. But yeah, super excited that things will be quicker in terms of the connection.

Connor Galbraith (14:17) Yeah, 800 gigawatts in the pipeline currently. It’s, mean, most of that will never get built, but yeah, the change from first come first served to first come and needed and served is another sign of the state taking a bit more of an active role in deciding what should be able to skip the queue.

Cynthia Grainger (14:21) Exactly.

Adam Sroka (14:38) It would be interesting to see how that plays out in the long run.

Cynthia Grainger (14:43) I mean, I tell you, was so I was at an energy summit conference a few weeks ago and the energy minister was there, the new energy minister. And I’ll tell you what, he was very scared because there was lots of questions about that. But actually, we all came away from that conference thinking that

even though he’d been in that role for short term, he sort of knew what he was talking about and had a view of what he wanted to do, which I have not seen in a while in these conferences. So yeah. And the other one I was going to say is P415, which we’ve been quite involved in, know, huge changes to the sort of flexibility market, more opportunities for wholesale for behind the meter.

And I think this is super exciting and we’ve seen a lot of interest on our side on that.

Adam Sroka (15:35) Yeah, really interesting example of how like that change leads to quite a significant technical challenge for people that it affects and it has knock on effects to systems processes, software, humans, jobs, workloads that maybe aren’t quite captured in the initial. Oh we’ll just change a few things on the regulation.

Yeah, leads to some very interesting technology solutions that have been fun to implement.

Cynthia Grainger (16:10) Yeah, so I think one of the things that I’ve seen P415. Settlements have always been complicated in energy and now you bring in more complexity, whether it be a flexibility company that you need to settle as well.

Adam Sroka (16:25) Yeah, and we ran like webinars last summer on on this because it was a really interesting time. Settlement is really hard and it got made harder. And there’s lots of ways to solve that problem, but the most scalable we found yeah, there was a tech solution that was quite straightforward to deploy and and means you can do quite a lot at scale and going forward makes it understandable.

things like that. It’s not… I mean I feel like this because it’s my life right and this is where we sit but I think I find actually the energy industry is not very…

forward thinking in going to like a software solution first. I think energy is quite strange in that there’s always a new box or a new piece of kit or something. And there’s like a new device that will solve the problem. But actually existing software systems, existing platforms and a bit of rejigging under the hood. And these things will do a lot of the stuff that’s really hard. Now that’s non-trivial, but it’s certainly cheaper than going out to

tender to some other supplier getting some new piece of kit installed most of the time. It’s an interesting

Cynthia Grainger (17:46) We’re

quite backwards, actually. I think coming into this world, obviously, I started working in the tech side about three years ago. Even when we talk here, you would be surprised to see there’s still loads of quite other big suppliers who’ll still be doing stuff on Excel, still be using stuff manually, invoice manually, and so on. So I think it’s because it’s such a

Adam Sroka (18:06) Mm-hmm.

Cynthia Grainger (18:14) old industry people have had to evolve with the time and maybe it’s a little bit slower than it should be and I was just you know thinking about it today before this podcast I think one of the big issues is that we’re still trying to run a centralised energy system and we are more and more decentralised and obviously technology needs to support that but I think there is delays in people taking that on and I think you’re right it’s just that

We’ve added, there’s a bit here and a bit there. If you look at some of the companies I’ve worked at, they had eight or nine systems that we were dealing with. if something came in, and you put this in, and you put… it’s all very bitty. So we need to come in and change the whole of it.

Connor Galbraith (19:00) Yeah, I think it’s no secret that at Hypercube we’re technology agnostic, but we have, I think we’re big fans of Databricks in particular. This isn’t sponsored by them, but we fully buy into the idea of platform engineering over anything else and being the power of being able to see everything that is pertinent to your…

to your assets and your business in a single place. And that usually means aggregating over many different sources and being able to effectively exert some sovereignty over everything that is created and generated by your own assets is a really big theme that we think we’re going to see more of, or at least push to see more of going forward in 2025. Because as settlement does get more complicated, yes, there’s…

bigger opportunity for riskier strategies like NIV chasing. It also means your operation has got to be watertight. It’s got to be top notch. And a great place to start is having everything under one roof.

Adam Sroka (20:10) Even yeah, like baffles me that the. Delay that people are willing to just swallow in like getting to see their own data to make decisions on it like you can make this stuff nearly real time and you can make stuff at the touch of a button and it’s all possible, but we’re comfortable with manually exporting things into CSVs and filling around in Excel files I mean, there’s a lot of wins and

acceleration at pace is quite easy to… that’s like the first step on your kind of analytics journey. I guess next question I really wanted to ask, kind of leading into that, was what are the sort of big significant changes or like your high hopes, I guess, for how better integration of kind of AI and analytics will change the energy system and change the way this is being done?

Cynthia Grainger (21:02) I think my view is that the work that we’re doing allows more transparency and view of assets and that will bring more investment into it is what I would like by the end 2025 because we are seeing a bit of a dip. Revenues have gone down. In batteries, some of the programmes are oversubscribed. But I think if…

If people have the transparency to see what is going on with their assets and their portfolios, then they’ll be less at risk and more comfortable with more investment. That’s what I would like to see.

Connor Galbraith (21:44) Yeah, from the tech side, I mean, we do love a buzzword over here, but AI is a much abused term currently. I think in the perspective of asset operation and the energy sector more broadly, if you replace in your mind every time you hear AI with just better automation,

you can frame the technology in the context of, for instance, going back to quick reserve. Okay, we have a one minute response time on these calls now. That might not be something that our, I don’t know, our traders can respond to quickly enough, you know, what ramifications does that have for our positioning further on. If you have systems that are artificially intelligent, that know your strategy, that are trained on

your data, you can respond to these market opportunities and these additional value streams much more systematically and much faster than you otherwise would be able to. And that’s definitely how we’re approaching it. Not as a gimmick, but just a way of doing what effectively supporting traders and operations to make them, if you pardon the cliche, superhuman.

As this market gets too complex.

Adam Sroka (23:12) Completely agree and I think it’s very interesting actually. It’s one of the few times

where there’s a lot of advantage for being an early adopter of some of this stuff. So like you’ve seen, we’ve seen some organisations really jump on the AI hype train and deploy some stuff and get some quick wins at quite considerable cost for the deployment and the kind of bespoke development of their own new solution. But then six months later, like one of the super major hyperscaler type organisations just released

that project as a feature that was included in the $20 a month subscription cost that they were paying anyway and effectively hand that advantage over to everyone else without them having to make the investment. Now that’s not terrible like it might be painful for some places but at the same time learning the organisational side the organisational change side of learning how to operate and interact with this new

capability, this new superpower is actually probably more valuable than the actual tool itself in a lot of cases because it takes a long time to get that stuff. It’s a double-edged sword in that you have to be quite wary that you’re not investing heavily into something that’s going to come out for $20 a month in a few months time or get blown out of the water by some research group somewhere. But at the same time, you’re either in front or you’re behind.

Adam Sroka (24:45) you either wait for these things to happen and then never build the organisational muscle memory to really capitalise on it or you be bold and you get ahead and you bet on that six month window if that’s all you’re going to get which you’ll never know but you bet on that recouping enough of the investment that it is going to be worthwhile because you’re going get faster and you’re going to be better at adopting this stuff and you’re going to be more agile in the process and the only kind of defense mechanism to

that I guess is just being submerged in what’s happening and keeping a really close ear to the ground and trying to make sure you’re up to date with what are Anthropic doing versus OpenAI What’s DeepSeek and why is everyone excited by it?

Connor Galbraith (25:28) Yeah, agreed. To say it’s saturated would not do it justice. It’s much more important than that because on the face of it, you just see a chat interface, but behind there’s a lot of very different and contrasting approaches to bringing in these AI products, these agents, is a hot new word for them.

I do think though, you can’t really talk about bringing in these agentic models into your business or workflow without talking about the risks involved and the, not just the obvious ones, like the liability for if a decision taken by an AI goes wrong, but more the…

the offloading of critical thinking to these AI capabilities and whether or not, you’re talking about retaining institutional knowledge, the more of that you offload to an AI, it’s almost like hiring a new contractor every day that then leaves and is replaced by a new one. Unless you’re really, really rigorous about understanding what it’s telling you and the actions that it’s taking.

That is knowledge that is lost to the ether even if it is making you money.

Adam Sroka (26:49) I completely agree in it. It’s quite funny. The amount of like sort of naysayers and stuff you’ll get on LinkedIn. People saying that it’s going to replace software engineering. It’s going to replace development. It just makes me laugh because like we’ve not been able to accurately understand what the customer wants for the last like four decades.

Good luck to any AI that tries to understand what the requirements really are. Okay, and they’re good at producing code at a pace, but the hard bit of software has always been understanding what code to produce in the first place.

Adam Sroka (27:23) So I don’t think we’re, we’ve anything to fear just yet in losing swathes of jobs or replacing groups of people, but you’re totally right in the way you’re talking about the human in the loop, superhuman kind of enhanced capability. That is the model to go forward with

and we’ve seen big successes in that space. I guess just to build on that a little bit and Cynthia, you speak to a hell of a lot of organisations in this space that give good insights. Do you feel that there’s a gap in the kind of skills for the energy sector, like in where this is going and being future proof?

Cynthia Grainger (28:01) Yeah, I mean, so I’ve been here for 7 months. We’ve probably spoken to most of the big battery in the battery world, which is what I’m specifically working on. There definitely is I mean, we’re talking to some investors that are investing billions of pounds, but they have a very small data tech team, or if they even have one. And I think first, there needs to be the

the know how that they need it. I think some of them just don’t think they need it. They do in this complicated market, as we’ve talked about. And secondly is, I mean, you see the lack of techie AI engineers and so on in the whole, you know, in every sector. And then you’ve got in this sector even more so because, you know, it’s the people that actually invest probably

Adam Sroka (28:33) Mm-hmm.

Cynthia Grainger (28:59) aren’t looking for these people. So yeah, I definitely think that there’s a huge opportunity. And again, you know, we’ve seen that in all the meetings that we’ve had and so on. I think it’s coming, I think in the UK it’s been because portfolios are less complicated and smaller, and as they’re getting more complicated, and as they’re understanding the technology more, then AI and data is becoming more and more important.

And it’s the operational data, not just the financial, because I think we concentrate a lot on financial, but I think we need to start also looking at operational stuff.

Connor Galbraith (29:38) I’ll probably add this has been true at least since I’ve started really working in energy in earnest the Venn diagram of data and software experts and the overlap with energy experts is much smaller than you think and that’s a shame in a way because whilst it is becoming more attractive a specialism to go down

I still don’t think there’s anywhere near enough of us for the challenge and the scale of the digitalisation of not just the UK’s energy system. I mean, the UK is one of the most advanced markets in the world. We have, there are, yeah, indeed. One stat I was looking at before that’s,

Connor Galbraith (30:28) blew me away was at our peak in 2013, coal was generating about 130 terawatt hours of our energy. So roughly a third of our electricity. Currently in China, it’s 5 and a half thousand a year. We should be proud of our achievements as a country, but in terms of actually making an impact on the world’s climate and energy system, we need to be an example.

As opposed to saying we’re actually making a difference in terms of the numbers. And that’s not to dishearten everyone, but it does draw attention in my mind to the fact that the skills that are needed have a sort of, this is going to sound quite grandiose, but they have a bit of an existential importance to them in order to make this transition work. And it needs to not just be concentrated in places like…

London, Glasgow, possibly Berlin, possibly LA, it needs to be much broader than that.

Adam Sroka (31:37) Totally agree, I think on that point around being an example.

Don’t know if it’s some sort of weird British pride thing, but it’s okay to be the world’s guinea pig. Like that’s all right. That’s okay. Like someone’s got to be the testing ground for this and some of this stuff. And like, if it’s us in some cases, then great, that’s fine. Someone’s got to do it and let the other places around the world would take the best bits and build more efficient systems, faster, cheaper. That’s fine. Like that’s our, that’s a small sort of

price to pay for some of the damage we’ve managed to cause over the last 200 years. And when it comes to skills and yeah, the grandiose kind of…

mission statement, I guess. Again, cheesy, but like 100% why Hypercube exists is can we build a really cool place to attract really talented techies and then point all those super clever people

Adam Sroka (32:40) at the energy transition, right? And try and move the needle a tiny bit by accelerating some of this stuff. And yeah, I think there’s a lot to play for still and organisations that we’re working with are starting to see the benefit of it. This is the whole podcast turned into a big sales pitch for Hypercube, which it wasn’t meant to be, but also, yeah, look, if you are a superstar energy techie, we are hiring as well, might as get that in there.

Cynthia Grainger (33:10) I would say that as somebody who’s got a lot of experience in energy, but less in tech, as I said, for three years, it is amazing the amount I’ve learned in 7 months of how this is what is going to get us to net zero. People ask, what do we need to do? I think this plays a massive part, data and AI.

Adam Sroka (33:31) You would say that.

Cynthia Grainger (33:33) It’s true though, I’m not lying!

Connor Galbraith (33:33) Ha

Adam Sroka (33:37) Well, it’s been an absolute pleasure, team. Thank you very much for joining me. We should do more of these. We’ll find out how well the audience think it lands. For those listening, thank you for joining us again in 2025, season 2. We’re excited for another year of some really interesting guests. We’ve got some cool stuff on the horizon to announce. We’ve got some amazing people lined up to talk to throughout the year. And as always, if you’re interested in coming and chatting

about data technology and the energy sector. We’d love to hear your thoughts. All the best and thanks again.

Cynthia Grainger (34:13) Thank you.

Connor Galbraith (34:15) Thanks Adam.