Energy markets in transition: BESS, innovation, and carbon impact

Aazzum (00:02)
look at some of the countries, in Scandinavia where they have the lowest energy costs globally, unsubsidised as well, because they’ve leveraged their natural resources. They’ve leveraged hydropower. We’ve got the Middle East now

they’re heavily investing in solar and batteries because even though they have one of the lowest energy costs in the world through subsidised oil and gas, they know that solar and batteries combined will essentially be cheaper than what they can do longer term. And that’s why they’ve started to invest in it today. Because if you can make energy cheap enough, you know, you’re going to create that demand for all this future technology that we’ve been talking about.

Adam Sroka (00:55)
Hello and welcome back to the Hypercube podcast. I’m delighted today to be joined by Aazzum Yassir, who is Director of Technology and Operations at Pulse Clean Energy. Great to have you here. How are you?

Aazzum (01:09)
Great, thanks Adam, thanks for having me and great to see you again.

Adam Sroka (01:12)
Thank you.

So for the audience, would you like to just introduce yourself, what you’re up to at Pulse Clean Energy, what your role’s about.

Aazzum (01:19)
Yeah, sure. So Aazzum Yassir, Director of Technology and Operations for Pulse. And, my background, I’ve been in the renewable space for over 15 years. Started off, the first project I built was a biogas plant. So the largest in Europe at the time, which is a 12 megawatt plant. That was at a wastewater treatment facility and the methane that was created from that process was essentially used to power CHP machines that were on site.

And the electricity for that basically powered the site and actually exported some as well at the time. So it was a great first kind of role in the field. I didn’t last too long because I was based on site and it was a waste treatment facility. So the smell wasn’t the best. But then I moved into the transmission space where I focused on building onshore wind.

some of the world’s first offshore wind projects, HPDC interconnectors, which used MMC technology, which some of your followers might be aware of. And then over the past 10 years, I’ve really been focused on the distributed transmission and energy sector around microgrids, battery storage and digitalisation technologies. So it’s been a great journey. The last couple of years, I’ve been at Pulse where we’re really focused on

advancing the future of what the energy system will look like. So yeah, that’s me in a nutshell.

Adam Sroka (02:32)
Amazing and I had the pleasure of hosting a panel at battery asset management summit Lessons from the Veterans and it’s fair to say you are a veteran in the industry. You’ve been through a lot of the changes back from when the GB market had teeny weeny baby batteries compared to what we’re seeing in development now. For people that are maybe more familiar with some of that journey. It’d good to understand why pulse and what’s different about the way pulse are doing things?

Aazzum (03:00)
Yeah, definitely. So Pulse Clean Energy, we invest, own, operate, and we focus on the management of energy, which I think is a key thing. The tools we use today are synchronous condensers and battery storage. Primarily, we’ve invested in quite a lot of battery storage projects. Our shareholder and backer is IMCO, which is a large Canadian pension fund

where we raised half a billion Canadian dollars from them a number of years back. And then, you know, through some financing, we’ve essentially been using that capital to deploy our projects. And I think what really kind of sets Pulse apart is we really care about what we’re doing and we really care about the future of the energy system. And that’s why we kind of set this business up to really focus on the management of energy, because we’ve seen it as a massively under-invested asset class.

We’ve seen lots of companies out there who have been investing in renewable projects, wind, solar, so on and so forth. But the management of energy was really a key piece for us to enhance and build upon. And when you talk about numbers in what’s required just in the UK alone, we need almost a 10x increase by 2050 of storage, whereas

if you look at wind and some of the other technologies, it’s like a 2-3x, just within the numbers itself, you can see how under invested it has actually been. And, you know, this technology is essentially going to underpin the future energy system. So yeah, really excited to be working on the stuff that we are.

Adam Sroka (04:27)
There’s some big numbers getting chucked about and it’s interesting to see like from my time in renewables and BESS like it feels at times technologically quite different and more advanced like I think the data and some of the active management of the asset just because of the way they behave. You made a really good comment about swiss army knives at the summit. We’ll get to later, but the way they behave.

Seems quite advanced, but then actually the investment, the understanding is caught behind like the more mature market in renewables and things like that. And I guess like from the sums of money that you’re talking about, like, yes, it’s apparent. You see it in how capital is getting deployed, where it’s going. And you raised a load of money back in August, right? One of the largest deals for BESS in the UK.

Aazzum (05:09)
That’s right.

It is, yeah. So, our financing journey started in 23. So that’s where we did our first financing facility where we raised one hundred and seventy five million pounds. And it was the first of its kind deal to essentially receive financing from National Wealth Fund, which I’m not sure if you’re familiar with, but they’re essentially owned by the UK Treasury and they only finance projects which have differentiation or advances

core areas which are maybe under invested in. And so at the time it was great to bring them on board because they essentially acted as an anchor financing and it helped to support and encourage additional finances to come in into that deal at a time who were Santander, CIBC and Investec. So when we went through our financing around this year, you know, we had a discussion with all the existing Syndicate members and

Adam Sroka (05:47)
Yeah.

Aazzum (06:02)
the great thing was NWF were like, look, we’ve done what we needed to do. We’ve kind of raised the asset class. We don’t need to take part in this deal. And so the current deal that we raised, 220 million pounds, was done with some of the existing lenders, such as Santander, CIBC, and Investec but then we introduced new ones like NatWest, ABN AMRO and NordLB. So it was really great.

to see in that space of time the maturity in the market and the lenders really having a strong understanding of the asset class and how these assets really help support the system.

Adam Sroka (06:36)
Amazing and it shows that NWF are doing what they do like in Scotland they talk Scottish enterprise talks about trying to crowd in private funding so by being that anchor it enables other institutions to get involved and then you’re a guess testament now that and actually that means follow-on rounds it’s easier and easier because you’ve built trust and people can understand the business like you’re making the stuff actually happen, what are gonna do with all that money?

What are you spending it on?

Aazzum (07:04)
So we’re using it to basically help build out a number of our projects that we currently have at ready to build stage, which we currently have seven. And the plan is to essentially use that capital to help deploy those over the next couple of years. So yeah, it’s a really exciting time and like I said, it’s a testament to the hard work of the entire Pulse team in being able to be doing deals of this kind at such a magnitude.

Adam Sroka (07:27)
It just begs the question, is it going to be more? Are you going for bigger and better?

Aazzum (07:31)
So I’d say I think the plan is to always improve what you currently have, right? So just as I’m sure you’re planning to do something similar, we’ve built an amazing foundation here at Pulse and we want to basically use this as a springboard to help electricity markets across Europe. So yeah, definitely, think very excited about the future of where all that stuff lies.

Adam Sroka (07:53)
And with National Wealth Fund, you developed and released a tool for carbon emissions in the BESS space, right? How do you see that being used by the industry and changing the way we are?

Aazzum (07:59)
That’s right.

Definitely, what’s interesting with that is I’d been thinking about this for quite some time and nobody could answer my question. So part of my role at Pulse, I manage the technology side on our procurement elements. And so we did some analysis on the carbon footprint of building these projects. So what does that actually look like when you construct these projects? and

you know what we found is that especially the procurement elements especially the batteries are very energy intensive and typically the manufacturing plants where they’re being supplied from you know it’s probably coal power or something else powering them so it’s not a clean process in manufacturing those cells so what i really wanted to understand is what’s the payback period in terms of carbon so like if I

introduce a bunch of carbon by building these things. How long does it take for those assets to actually offset that? So did quite a bit of research didn’t really find too much on batteries. There were some articles on EV but that didn’t really answer the question so the journey I was already on and as I’m thinking about how we’re gonna actually answer these questions National Wealth Fund approached me and were like hey look

we’re trying to understand how batteries kind of reduce carbon and how they operate. And I was like, I’m trying to figure out the same thing. So we kind of put together a working group to kind of work through that with some other industry elements. And then we brought on board LCP to be that independent expert and modeler who could actually help us answer some of these questions and provide transparency on how it’s been developed.

So that’s the kind of background of what it took and how we got there. And, you know, it was really rewarding to be able to release that and make that tool open source. You know, we could have kept that for and I think these are some of the things which are just going to help move the market forward. So it was just a no brainer for us just to make it open source and make it available to everybody. And, you know, to answer back to my question of like, how long does it take to offset the carbon hit?

So once we did the piece of work, this is like 2 years worth of work to get to a number, right? We did the work and based on our first projects, which we constructed back in 2023, it works out to around 5 years for these assets to become carbon neutral. And, you know, considering those early projects probably have like a 10-15 year asset life, I think that’s amazing. We’re now working with suppliers who are

Adam Sroka (10:24)
Mm-hmm.

Aazzum (10:29)
working on enhanced and cleaner manufacturing processes and we think that can probably be reduced to probably less than 2 to 3 years, which again is amazing. So I think that’s just part of the work, which is great to see some of the results there.

Adam Sroka (10:44)
You’ve got an interesting stance on climate change, right? And you’ve said sometimes that actually polarisation is less than helpful and you can put politics to one side and there’s a really strong economic argument for doing so and stuff. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Aazzum (10:58)
Yeah, definitely. I’d say maybe before I answer the question, let me ask you one. If you were the supreme leader of the world or the supreme leader of a country, what would be the quickest way to fuel an industrial revolution? What would you do to enable that to go forward?

Adam Sroka (11:08)
yeah.

Yeah, I think that’s interesting. I guess.

Aazzum (11:21)
You’d want to make energy super affordable, right? Super cheap because energy power underpins everything that we do in the modern world, everything from computers to AI. Like none of this stuff happens without power and energy infrastructure. And so, you know, from my perspective in the UK, our bills are increasing and

Adam Sroka (11:25)
Yeah, okay.

Aazzum (11:44)
there’s a combination of factors. Renewables gets a lot of the blame, but it’s not really the case. The real case is that we’re dependent on gas imports and gas sets the marginal price in the UK, with the volatility, especially with the recent wars, that’s what’s led to some of the current circumstances. But in addition, we’ve massively under invested in our power infrastructure. And when I started my career over 15 years ago,

there were areas of the UK which you know we were talking about at the time and we’re still talking about the same constraint areas, contaminant areas today. So we’ve known about it for a long time but nothing was really done and so now now we’re in like an urgent need where we need to reinforce the infrastructure. If we want to get this country ready for the future of how things are going to be changing we need to massively invest in that and that’s because

there’s going to be a future demand for that, right? So we’ve got heat networks because again, they’re linked to gas. They need to move over to electricity or as much as possible, move those over. We’ve got demand of data centres. We’ve got new houses, new jobs. We’re expecting a population increase of an additional 10 million people by 2050. Like all of that stuff, you know, we need to invest in this infrastructure and so because we’ve not done it,

someone has to pay for that stuff and unfortunately it’s going to be consumer bills because that’s how this thing gets funded. So those will rise but longer term if we do our job right we will make energy cheaper and so I look at some of the politicians out there who are promoting this idea that we just drill everything that’s in the North Sea and we just use that. There’s really 2 key flaws with that. One is

there isn’t enough reserves there to even get us to 2030 alone if we used everything. if we were able to extract everything as quickly as possible, which is in reality is not possible, we wouldn’t have enough to get us beyond 2030. So it’s a fallacy and it’s the wrong message. And I think the recent wars have shown that being dependent on energy from other countries.

It doesn’t make sense, right? It’s such a fundamental piece of our infrastructure and it underpins everything in a modern society. To give control over that to another nation, it’s not logical. It doesn’t make sense, right? And then you look at some of the countries, in Scandinavia where they have the lowest energy costs globally, unsubsidised as well, because they’ve leveraged their natural resources. They’ve leveraged hydropower. We’ve got the Middle East now

they’re heavily investing in solar and batteries because even though they have one of the lowest energy costs in the world through subsidised oil and gas, they know that solar and batteries combined will essentially be cheaper than what they can do longer term. And that’s why they’ve started to invest in it today. Because if you can make energy cheap enough, you know, you’re going to create that demand for all this future technology that we’ve been talking about. And so from a UK perspective, we have a significant natural resource wind, right?

And so we should be leveraging that. I wasn’t going to say solar because it’s not always sunny, with wind, we are world leaders in onshore and offshore wind and we should definitely be leveraging that. Combined with batteries, which underpin what a future grid would look like, we can make energy cheaper. We can make it affordable and we can, you know, my dream is that it gets to a point where it’s basically a subscription, just like any infrastructure like

Adam Sroka (14:52)
popular is calling.

Aazzum (15:14)
broadband maybe your phone contract and your broadband. This is standard infrastructure, which it doesn’t really have any marginal cost rates similar to renewables and batteries. So I think we can get there, but we’d need to get the technology, we’d need to deploy everything in the right way. We need to make sure we get regulation correct. There’s a lot of moving pieces.

And this is not an easy industry to work in. There’s a lot of regulation which we need to work with and make sure what that looks like really enables what the future I’m kind of trying to describe here.

Adam Sroka (15:47)
I mean that’s amazing, like so much to touch on. In the interest of honesty and openness that wasn’t going to be my answer but I wish it was so what I was going to say was now wrong so I’m going retroactively say energy. But I’ve supported by my journey a little bit because way back long ago, longer than I care to admit, when I was doing my masters in Manchester, one of my modules I had to write like a whole research report on the

National Ignition Facility, which was over the states where they’re trying to get like 250 odd enormous lasers to try and create a little mini star in a room. And that was what first captured my attention for both high energy laser physics, which I went on to do my doctorate in, and then energy. And I did a lot, I spent a lot of time looking at like, well, what would happen if energy was just free? And I know like it’s thought experiment, like, because there’s always going to be cost of structuring network.

Aazzum (16:26)
Wow.

Right.

Adam Sroka (16:43)
But imagine energy was free, what would actually happen to the world? And that is kind of what happened in the last Industrial Revolution. We went from this place where energy was created by humans or animals

to a place where there was all this like energy just sat in the ground that we could put into steam engines and things and have it do work for us. it was a semi-free way that cost extraction processing. So I totally agree that that change in energy because you look at the mega trends towards AI taking over all the knowledge work and robots taking over all the physical work. Horrific stat like Amazon.

seeking to replace 70% of its manual workforce with robots like a million people. A million people just like, that’s quite a lot. So how do you drive if that is the dystopian future we hoping for? Like, how do you make that even more profitable? You drive the cost of energy down and then you’ve only got maintenance to worry about. So I totally, wholeheartedly agree that that’s the way to do it. What I was going to lean into and where I stuck was when you asked me the question,

Aazzum (17:24)
I saw, yeah, something like that. Yeah, it’s crazy. Yeah, scary. Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Sroka (17:50)
with something that someone had said to me a long time ago. And I totally agree. It’s a great argument for the way the energy sector’s moving and kind of like what we’re doing at Hypercube, what Pulse are doing. But the long and short of this sector is that you take capital from pension funds or other places, you take huge sums of money and you do things that are profitable to make them more money. Right and there’s green fuzzies and you’re using the capital.

ways that make positive impact. But the long and short of the solution to climate change is the second is vastly more profitable to create renewable energy than any other source. Wall Street will solve climate for us. Like it was just immediately overnight, all the money will flood in and it just get solved for us, right? If we can make it reliably more profitable, like the selfish intentions of everyone will just naturally solve all these problems for us. So if I was to kickstart an industrial revolution to answer the question.

How do I make this more profitable and align the needs of the individual, the selfish needs of every individual player to the long-term needs of the planet and society as a whole and so on and so forth. So it’s an interesting take and I really like it.

Aazzum (18:57)
You know, I think we currently live in a time where, and this is something our CEO said, and it really kind of stuck with me, that there’s really 2 major dynamics in the UK and many other countries is that we have a bunch of these thermal plants, synchronous generators, whatever you want to call them, where we can predict the time of production, but we can’t always predict the price, right? But we have renewables where we can’t always predict the time of production, but we can predict the price.

Batteries is essentially the underpinning technology to allow renewables to do both of those things. It’s the first time where we will be able to predict time, price and do all of that through the deployment of batteries. And so I think that’s a really interesting way to kind of look at the problem. I had this conversation with a friend a number of weeks back and we just both recently got EV cars.

And I’m a huge petrolhead. I rebuild classic cars and I do all this kind of stuff. Like for me, was like, electric cars. And I started driving it and I’m using it. And like for day to day getting about, it’s unbelievable. Like I’m paying I think a week to charge it. And I’m like, if this technology was available to us a hundred years ago, there’s no way we would have built ICE cars.

Adam Sroka (20:01)
Yeah.

Aazzum (20:13)
We would have gone with EVs. Now, I know we had EVs at the time, but they had huge range problems. I’m kind of saying if we had the technology which competed with ICE at the time. But I find the whole argument a bit strange because it’s definitely, for moving and getting around, it’s definitely a great piece of technology. I see the power industry as the same. Like the way we’ve generated

power globally hasn’t really changed from burning stuff and spinning a turbine. We’ve been doing that for over 150 years and I’m like, okay, we can just generate electricity directly without having to burn stuff now. Doesn’t that make sense to invest and try and move towards that future?

Adam Sroka (20:53)
See on that specific point, there’s just a touch back on the National Ignition Facility.

The main guy that runs it, Moses, does this really, really good talk and he talks about how complicated it goes on and on and on, it’s really detailed physics. And he gets to the end of the talk and the laser’s shooting at the combustion and all this. And he goes, and then, and it’s quite embarrassing really. And then we heat up some water and we drive some turbines. he’s like, there’s not really any other way to capture all the energy.

No, we drive an EV now and absolutely love it. Obviously you save money on the fuel, the whole forecourt industry had connections in its shell a long time ago. And they were saying that they know more about Coca-Cola sales than Coca-Cola do, because they sell more of it than anyone else. Because of every petrol station. I think it’s an interesting point, because I’m no longer spending like…

seven, eight quid on sausage rolls and coffees every time I top my car up, as well, you get all these additional savings and help. Yeah, if not having to go to petrol station. So, right, we’ve talked about climate tech, we’ve talked about politics. I’d like to touch on, you did a body of work to look at, and this is related to an earlier point, you did a body of work to look at your supply chain and actually drive some real positive change in the way.

Aazzum (21:47)
Yeah, all these additional benefits, right? Yeah.

Adam Sroka (22:10)
supply chains are managed and how you’re driving some innovation in that space. Could you expand on some of that for us?

Aazzum (22:15)
Yeah, sure. So we’ve done quite a bit of the work in this space. We understand that we’re dealing with regions where human rights aren’t valued the same as what Pulse and what everybody else, I’d imagine, considers that a basic right. It’s kind of strange. We still live in a world where some of those things are in question. It’s kind of like a non-starter for us.

We did a lot of work and we actually released a public statement about this earlier this year. And it was really to take a stance on supply chain ethics, you know, which is essential for long term business sustainability. So it’s the right thing to do, but it’s also something that, you know, as businesses, we need to make sure we’re incorporating that. And, just like the industrial revolution transformed our lives, you know, we’ve been on an exponential growth of knowledge and advancements of technology since then. But

you know, if you reflect back on the good things that we’ve done and the bad things that we’ve done, we found better ways to do things right. And so we know in the past there was a lot of human rights abuses that took place. we know it’s not, it’s not acceptable today. So we need to be making sure we’re doing the right things there. And so part of that effort was to essentially embed a specialist consultant Infyos into our process. And we’ve been working with them for about

think want to say 18 months now roughly around how we incorporate and gain further transparency into the supply chain in itself.

Adam Sroka (23:46)
What happens when they tell you things that you don’t want to hear? Like, how does that play out?

Aazzum (23:50)
So they’ve not told us anything too crazy, which I guess is good because we’ve done it through our procurement process that we’ve been running, we’ve worked with suppliers who are doing the right things. Now, I think part of the challenge is that the market itself is still not completely transparent. So there could be stuff happening there which we don’t know about.

But that’s why we’ve kind of embedded them into our overall process because we really want to understand at every stage from, you know, mining those raw materials to the finished product, like how was that done and was it done in the right way? And so, you know, we’re really focusing on trying to uncover, malpractice in labour, in environment, in geopolitical issues, you know, batteries themselves have

really complex supply chains. It’s not to be underestimated. They are complex. There’s a lot of moving parts that happens in there. So understanding suppliers, ensuring we’re monitoring how they’re progressing, no supplier today is doing everything in the best way they could. There’s definitely room for improvement. And so we’re aligning ourselves with suppliers who have a roadmap of how they’re going to do that and we think

the EU battery regulation is actually a really cool piece of legislation. The UK doesn’t actually have anything equivalent. we’ve adopted it. Not that we need to, but we wanted to do that because it really helps us flesh out our ideas and what suppliers should be looking to do in the future. And so, as I mentioned, they’re really helping us navigate the space, understand, increase the transparency, but then

also it’s a 2-way street. We’re working with the suppliers and working with them to say, this is what we want to see. If you want to continue doing business with us in the future, these are our requirements around ethical sourcing. And so the feedback that we’re getting from the supply chain is really positive as well.

Adam Sroka (25:43)
That’s amazing. Do you think so, there’s a couple of points like, are you getting more insights into potential innovations and change and stuff by being that close to your supply chain and the way things might change? And secondly, like, how do you think?

my gut feeling hearing that is like that surely the rest of the industry is going to start moving towards that kind of approach especially if the EU is starting to push some of this and everyone wants to expand out that way. How do you see the UK grid changing and the way like players like Pulse are interacting with the markets and stuff changing in next 10 years?

Aazzum (26:20)
I think I see this as almost a service to the industry, similar to the carbon emissions calculator. The work I’m doing right now, you know, we will benefit from it because we’ll know exactly the correct way of how we should be doing things. But from my perspective, I would want to then make sure I share that information in some sort of forum, right, where the industry can learn. And so,

the benefits to the industry should also kind of be visible because as I work with the supplier, as we improve what their processes are, they then automatically benefit another supplier that they’re working with. So they don’t need to put as much time and effort or whatever they might need to do to get to that position. And so I really do think that the work that we’re doing is laying a foundational element alongside Infyos our consultant to really

set out a blueprint of how we should be doing this long term. To kind of give you an idea, Apple have been working on this problem for a long time and they have, you know, billions of dollars at their disposal. It’s not, it’s not an easy problem and they’re still finding areas of concerns that they’re kind of working towards. This is going to be continuous thing. We’re not going to solve it overnight, but I think with the right parties, we can figure out these complex problems.

Adam Sroka (27:32)
It’s interesting because do you think it’s the kind of place where actually lots of other developers and asset owner operators could collaborate to try and it’s kind of a non-competitive like you said, service to the industry. It seems like I’m really kind of like a forum and open forum for people to contribute and chip in.

Aazzum (27:50)
Yeah, so the ESN has a working group for the stuff. Unfortunately, I’ve not attended the last few, but I think we should be, as a industry, talking more with one another. I don’t really see competitors in this space. Clearly we have competitors, right? We’re competing for people, for grid connections, for land, and all this kind of stuff, But ultimately, the way I kind of look at it is like,

Pulse couldn’t do all of this by ourselves. So we want our competitors to be good because we should all be aligned because what we’re essentially trying to do is make energy cheaper, more reliable, affordable. Right. And so if we’re all aligned in that, we should be helping each other to a certain degree along the way. Right. Obviously we want to remain some competitive advantage but I do think this is not a traditional, kind of business sector in that sense, where it’s like Amazon vs Microsoft and that.

Adam Sroka (28:42)
I agree.

Aazzum (28:43)
We’re all trying to do the right thing and make things better for the next generation.

Adam Sroka (28:48)
That’s why it makes total sense for everyone to use the same technology consultancy but no genuinely I believe that though like actually I agree with you on the kind of semi non competitive nature of the industry. It’s much like airline safety. It’s like that, you just need everyone to collaborate

Aazzum (28:53)
You

Exactly. Everyone

needs to be doing the same thing, yeah. Because then it’s bad for the industry if someone isn’t doing that, right?

Adam Sroka (29:09)
Yeah, and any exactly in any single battery that massively underperforms or doesn’t do well throws up a red flag to the investment community so you do want everyone to do well. What about future tech like what do you think’s the most exciting technology innovations that are coming down the pipe and how are you staying ahead of them at Pulse like what’s getting you excited?

Aazzum (29:17)
Right. Right. Exactly.

Like this space I’ve never seen anything like it. So I’ve been you know into technology since I was a kid and I’d say the advancements of batteries is probably on par with semiconductors like it really is accelerating a really fast pace. So, when I started in this industry over 10 years ago we built the first large-scale project in Europe at the time.

So it wasn’t a commercial project, it was an innovation funded project. And at the time it was huge. It was 6 megawatts, 10 megawatt hours. And it used NMC battery technology supplied by Samsung SDI at the time and back then you were getting a megawatt hour in a 40-foot container and this really was very much a customised solution. Everything was designed from a bespoke end. It wasn’t like buying a car or

buying what these systems look like today. Every quotation we did and systems that we did was fully engineered from the get-go. So 1 megawatt hour in a 40-foot container, it cost around £800 per kilowatt hour at the time. Now we’re seeing energy density even more than this. So I’d say the average right now is probably around 6 megawatt hours in a 20-foot container. So that’s a 12x improvement

in a space of 10 years and the price of that is probably below £100 per kilowatt hour now. So it’s dropped by 90% so I just wanted to kind of start with that because I think the scale of how things have improved so quickly is incredible. Cycle life is another thing. The first projects we did even before then, I was doing projects with sodium, sulfur and lead acid.

Adam Sroka (31:00)
Thank you.

Aazzum (31:13)
And you know, you’re looking at 2/3 thousand cycles NMC at the time was around 4 thousand cycles We’re now seeing tech well over 10 thousand cycles. So for those who have been kind of worried about buying an EV car or anything like the battery will now outlive your car like but by a good margin and so I think that’s extremely promising as well. I think a combination of those things is what’s really gonna help accelerate batteries to be

in a lot of products. We’ll see as the price has come down, energy prices going up, we’ll see the resurgence of the behind-the-meter market where commercial and industrial customers will start to benefit. You know, you’ve got data centres talking some crazy numbers they need like, I think Facebook was like, need to build 10 gigawatts or something insane. You’re getting all these kinds of crazy numbers, like the grid’s not going to be there to do that.

So you’re going to be reverting back to microgrids and building your own energy parks to do this thing. These guys take reliability and resiliency to the Nth degree. So we know we had an AWS outage a couple of weeks back, but that’s not normal and it made the news because it’s not normal. Right. I’m sure they’ll have a huge amount of lessons learned that they’ll capture from that and improve. So battery technology has improved massively, cost has come down. Performance has improved.

We’ll start to see resurgences of commercial industrial users being able to kind of leverage this and on the back one of the things just before I move on to maybe the PCS and some of the other pieces is we’ve been following sodium-ion batteries for some time. I do really think that sodium-ion has a lot of promising attributes compared to LFP which actually make it

probably better suited and ideal for BESS applications. I think right now though, LFP technology has improved so massively and the cost is really competitive that we’ll have to see how sodium-ion develops and whether it can kind of take that mantle. But I’m super interested to see how that market develops. In terms of PCS technology, we’re seeing,

these products have typically not been in a high R&D cycle, which means, you know, the kind of refresh rate for that piece of technology was normally like every 4, 5 years, right? But as the battery is advancing almost on a yearly basis, these guys need to keep up. So we’re starting to see PCS manufacturers coming out with better matched.

PCS power outputs which better match the the battery side of power so that they kind of work in better balance and we’re seeing PCS manufacturers come out with advanced capabilities around, you know providing grid forming, inertia short-circuit contribution and black-start capabilities So by the way, these are actually nothing new in the industry in my previous roles that I worked at we would do we were deploying this type of technology, but

they were always kind of like a bespoke application. It was a microgrid for this reason or something else. This is now essentially trying to create revenue structures for these specific services, which NESO requires and that’s exciting and so I’m excited to see how that develops and deploy solutions where we’re able to provide those advanced capabilities, which the grid really needs as well.

Adam Sroka (34:25)
It’s an exciting time to be in the space. I just think it changes so much. It’s moving forward. It still feels like we’re at the start of something major, even though so much progress has been made. It’s been moving quickly for quite a while and it feels like we’re just getting going with quite a few things and seeing.

What is going to fall out the back of the next 10 years worth of development, both innovation, technology, financially, like on the software front. It’s definitely an interesting sector to get stuck into.

Aazzum (34:55)
⁓ 100%, definitely.

Adam Sroka (34:56)
So I guess just to wrap, what’s next for Pulse? What’s on your horizon? Next big major milestone, big press release that you’re gonna be shouting from the rooftops.

Aazzum (35:06)
So I’ll probably keep a lot of those under wraps for now, but you know, we are looking forward to we’ve currently got 2 projects under construction right now, which we will be finishing at the beginning of next year. So excited to see those projects come online and start operating them. I’m excited about starting the construction of our seven ready to build projects. So that financing that we mentioned previously is going to help essentially build out those projects.

Adam Sroka (35:09)
Alright.

Aazzum (35:31)
And, I’m excited about, essentially kind of replicating and expanding our footprint outside of the UK. I think, you know, part of this journey is really around as I kind of touched on in a few points in this conversation, it’s really about finding ways of how we can actually help society and I think that’s super important to not only me personally, but

to Pulse as a business. That’s why we see a lot of younger people kind of really excited about joining the business because they want to work in an exciting field, but that needs to align with some sort of principle. And I think working on a principle that you’re trying to find the right way of how you help society by reducing the cost of energy and fixing some of these dependency issues that we have in our electricity markets, I think

it’s a really noble cause and excited about seeing how we can develop that even further.

Adam Sroka (36:21)
Totally agree. Yeah, I think we are seeing a shift in the way that the labour market moves in that you’re getting the most young people want a purpose for their career. They want to commit their labour to something that’s going to do something, not just make a load of money. Like, nice to make a load of money, but to actually shift the needle.

Aazzum (36:36)
Right.

Adam Sroka (36:41)
Do something. So look, it’s been an incredible conversation. Thanks so much for joining us today. guess before we let anyone leave, I would just like to ask if anyone in the audience would like to find out more about you or Pulse, or if there’s anything you would like to promote or plug, where should we send them?

Aazzum (36:42)
Exactly.

Yeah, sure. So you can go to our website, pulsecleanenergy.com. We are posting more on LinkedIn. So when we first set up, we were super busy working and so we didn’t really do, the best job in kind of promoting who we are what we’re doing. We’re doing a better job on that now. So you can follow the Pulse Clean Energy account on LinkedIn and also myself on LinkedIn. I keep having this every new year. like, I want to.

I want to post more on LinkedIn and provide some insights into the market. Every year I have too much work, but hopefully next year I’m going to make that same promise with the intention of being able to post more and hopefully share some of the knowledge and information that has been accrued not only through Pulse but my previous experience as well.

Adam Sroka (37:38)
Amazing. Well, look, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Absolute veteran of the industry and as always, a fascinating conversation. Thank you very much for joining.

Aazzum (37:47)
Yeah,

Really appreciate having me on, Adam. Thanks for your time, yeah.

Adam Sroka (37:52)
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.