Integrated Solar and Wind: Data Platforms, Repowering, and Batteries

Hypercube Podcast Transcript

Title: Integrated Solar and Wind: Data Platforms, Repowering, and Batteries

Host: Adam Sroka
Guests: Giovanni Terranova & Jonathan Henderson

Giovanni Terranova (00:02)
knew, and we were one of the few saying,

This is a great investment for institutional investors in solar. This will be the centerpiece of the energy transition. And I would say we were right on that. But now with batteries, you see the same crucial pivotal role and different features, quite different features, but really essential. And the growth that we’ll have will be really interesting and being able to manage and invest in that

sector starting from development as we are doing now is very exciting.

Adam Sroka (00:54)
I am joined today by Giovanni and Jon from Bluefield. Would you like to introduce yourself please, gents?

Giovanni Terranova (01:02)
Giovanni Terranova, I’m one of the founders and Managing Partner of Bluefield Group and as a background I have a Master in Power Generation Engineering, MBA in Finance and I’ve been working all the last 22 years in Finance and Energy and in Bluefield I’ve been involved very much in all the kind of segments of Bluefield from fundraising, investment,

and also asset management and a bit of operations. And I’ve been in renewable energy, passionate about renewable energy since I was a young kid. And that’s why I did engineering, and then I did my Master on renewable energy back a long time ago, 30 years ago. So it’s quite a long time ago.

Adam Sroka (01:47)
We’re all getting grey these days, it’s hard.

Jon Henderson (01:49)
Yeah, Jon Henderson, I’m Director of Asset Management for Bluefield Services Ltd., so I’m responsible for approximately 140 solar and wind assets, operational assets in the UK. I’ve been with Bluefield for just under 12 months and prior to that I was working with major global utility

in the asset management and operations and maintenance areas of that business. Predominantly onshore wind, more lately some battery and just prior to me joining Bluefield was working in a bit more the solar area there as well. Prior to that I worked in financial services having left university.

And yeah, so I’ve been in the renewables area for coming up to 15 years, really love the speed of change and how things evolve so fast and the ability to get involved in strategic planning

and lots of problem solving. That’s the joy of the operational area is there’s always problems to solve and new things to fix.

Adam Sroka (02:56)
Yeah, new markets come along and break everything or a new asset class just comes and mixes stuff up. So it’s Bluefield Group – you’re like true end to end from planning and asset financing all the way through to operations and monetising your own assets, right?

Jon Henderson (03:00)
Yeah, absolutely.

Giovanni Terranova (03:14)
Yeah, basically, I mean, we started as a fund manager back at the end of 2009. So 15 years ago, we have one of the longest track record actually in investing in renewables. And we started as a fund manager with ambition to bring institutional investors into the sector. But soon after a few years, we’ve been an investor manager – and as I mentioned, I am an engineer as a background –

we wanted to play a different role, not only financial investor or investment manager, but having a more industrial approach. And that’s why starting from 2013, which is the year when we managed to list what was the first solar fund on the stock exchange in London, May Market, the Bluefield Solar Income Fund, we started more than 10 years ago, we started to build around the fund manager

a number of companies that cover indeed the value chain. As you said, now Bluefield is a Group of five companies that cover the value chain end to end. So from development all the way to operation. So we have a development company which does getting the permits, looking for the land, the grid, the kind of ingredients for getting renewable assets authorised. We have a construction management firm

which does not the physical construction, but controls the key components of the construction, which are the procurement and the monitoring of the construction quality. We have the fund manager at the center of the Group. And once the assets are operational, our grid connected, we have a service company which has asset management, headed by Jon here. And we have an engineering team, we have a monitoring team, monitoring the performance of the assets

across the UK, Europe. We have, last but not least, kind of on the other end of the value chain, the operation and maintenance. That is only for solar, and in the UK only. And that’s where we have our colleagues driving in vans and going around sites, swapping inverters, cables, and then fuses. So we started as a fund manager, but we

very soon, more than 10 years ago, we started to integrate on the value chain. And so we are today, really one of the very few fully integrated fund managers and operators and developer and asset manager, of course.

Adam Sroka (05:47)
Mm-hmm.

Simple. Nice, simple, easy business to build right?

Giovanni Terranova (05:53)
Simple. 15 years.

Adam Sroka (05:55)
And just to touch on that a little bit, because I’m really interested in like, did you build those other businesses or those other parts of the business through acquisition or did you build them from scratch? What was that journey like?

Giovanni Terranova (06:06)
No.

Indeed, it’s been fully kind of internal growth. So we did step by step. We started immediately soon after the listing of the fund, we started with the asset management. Shortly after, we added the operations. And six years ago, we added… well returned, because we were actually at the very beginning, we returned into the development.

Adam Sroka (06:14)
Wow.

Giovanni Terranova (06:31)
And then last but not least three years ago, the construction. So it’s been really organic. So no acquisition. That’s why it took a long time, more than 10 years to build. The Group now has more than 150 people across various geographies. So we are predominant in the UK, but we have good presence also, particularly in Italy and a bit in Spain. This

has proven quite fundamental, crucial for the delivery of the investments that have been always delivering over targets. Having a fully integrated team, there is an immediate advantage, which is kind of obvious. And for example,

the developers, our colleagues in development, they work very closely with the investment team, with the operations team and with the ESG team. And when they start developing a site, they rank the opportunities and they develop only the opportunity that makes sense from investment point of view, but also ESG operation and so on. So there is immediate advantage of having this full integration.

For example, we were the first and the only fund back in 2013 when we listed. We were the only one, and we’ve been for a while, the only one able to do construction. So funding the construction in the investment policy, all the other funds had investment policy restricting them to buy operational assets.

So why we’ve been able to do that? Because we had integrated engineers and asset management capabilities to be able to manage those risks. And by doing so, we have controlled the quality of the inputs, so our assets, and the construction quality, which means that we have had the opportunity to build up a quite high-quality portfolio. And the same applied recently, as the last example, We have been

one of the first movers in the repowering of aging assets. And again, this started in 2017, so a few years ago, we started to realise that having a multidisciplinary team allowed us to address the issue which is becoming more and more kind of relevant or market opportunity, I would say, of repowering or revamping all the aging assets. And you can do that if you are fully integrated because if not…

it is very hard to do this complex exercise of repowering. So, good benefits, long time to build up, but there are clear benefits of having a fully integrated platform.

Adam Sroka (09:14)
Yeah, and Jon, I was going to ask, so you’ve come from utilities where it’s a completely different game, right? And there’s like 10,000 people and every project’s got like 150 project managers on it and things, but you’ve come into an environment that is smaller, but still fully integrated and can do all of it. Do you feel like in the services business, do you feel that gives you opportunity to innovate like more so than you would have elsewhere?

Jon Henderson (09:23)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, as you say, global utility, thousands of people, change tends to be by accretion rather than being able to make things happen fast. So I think that was one of the appeals of coming to Bluefield, the opportunity to really influence change in a quick way. But again, the structure of Bluefield

sort of replicating a large utility with that full integration is also appealing because I can work with the field service teams and understand what’s happening with a certain type of component. We can find fixes to that quickly, we can find new suppliers, whatever it may be, but we can also…

inform our investment team and our engineering team and work with them not only on solutions, but actually how do we deal with this in the long term? So we get to influence buying decisions, engineering focus and so on. So yeah, think that’s been the real joy of being at Bluefield is the kind of best of both worlds for me. We still have the ability to influence throughout the whole life cycle,

but we can do it in a much quicker way and you can see the benefits of it immediately.

Adam Sroka (10:59)
I’m interested to know, you might not have an answer to this. However, say there’s someone else listening to this who’s maybe got one asset class in the UK and they want to become like Bluefield in the future. They’ve got a 15-year plan ahead of them. What’s hardest? A new asset class, a new territory or a new business unit from your experience?

Giovanni Terranova (11:14)
Ha.

I think to be honest, the more challenging thing is to grow organically. A new market, somehow I would rank easier because we did and I found personally less difficult because yes, there are some specificities of the local kind of regulation, local development rules, but overall you’re

already set up and your kind of experience and network and you can move relatively easy to another country. But building everything from scratch internally is something that took time. You have to build the culture, you have to build and connect different teams that have different backgrounds because you have investment. So we start as a fund manager and then you have, as Jon said, have field service engineers, developers,

asset manager. creating a common culture, sharing of best practice, that is quite time consuming. And I see today there are a lot of platforms, particularly developers, that are moving from just being a developer to a fully integrated IPP with all the functionalities. And I suspect that I’ve seen already some signs

that is not such an easy task to step up from being just a developer to become fully integrated. So I would say it’s more, yeah, I think the more difficult one is to build a truly integrated sharing of culture, having a common goal. It’s probably the toughest of the two. New market relatively easier with its own challenges, of course, relatively easier.

Jon Henderson (13:13)
I think

Historically you’ve been able to find the skills in the market as well, so if new technology classes come along, you can generally find the people.

Adam Sroka (13:20)
Mm-hmm.

Jon Henderson (13:23)
The rapid expansion in renewables and what we expect to see over the next few years mean that that’s harder to do now. So there’s huge competition for people. The labour market is not keeping up at the moment with the expansion of renewables. And so we’re finding it finding increasingly challenging to find and keep really good people because there’s so many opportunities.

But it’s a problem for the whole industry, as Giovanni touched on, culture, how we treat people, how we develop people, I think is really important at Bluefield. And that’s the key to retaining and attracting really high quality people.

Adam Sroka (14:06)
I’d echo that. I think we hear that from people across the industry about talent becoming more competitive. And people, especially up in Scotland where we are, joke about the great migration to London. Like everyone starts in great companies up here and then like the big deep pocket funds throw big salaries at them and everyone migrates south. I think the piece about culture is really interesting because although it’s a rapidly growing space, it’s complex and diverse.

It’s still quite a small ecosystem, the UK energy scene, and word does get about and reputation does get about fairly quickly I think if you’re good to your people, people get a sense of that fairly fast.

Giovanni Terranova (14:47)
Yeah,

that’s the key. The demand is high and it’s really important, the culture, taking generally care of people, development, giving them a chance to grow. And we have a very high retention rate across the entire value chain because it’s competitive in the engineering side, it’s competitive on investment, on the development side.

So it’s across the line, the growth of renewables has great success, but indeed there is increasing demand and smaller pool. But we have been so far very successful in terms of having very high retention for the industry.

Adam Sroka (15:30)
And Jon, you touched on emerging asset classes and like over the next sort of 5 to 10 years, do you have a strategy for where you’re gonna, cause you’ve got a really diverse portfolio of stuff, right? So is that, are you gonna keep the mix similar or are you gonna lean into anything in particular over the next few years or are you allowed to share?

Jon Henderson (15:52)
So yeah, I mean you’re right, we do have a diverse portfolio. think by revenue we’re about 20% wind, onshore wind, which I think not often associated with Bluefield. It’s seen as a, you know, primarily a solar business. So we have, you know, single stick small turbines. We have multi-megawatt wind farms as well. And then, you know, from very small…

sub-megawatt solar farms up to 50 megawatt plus. It is diverse. I think we certainly expect to see battery becoming more prominent over the next few years and we…

We don’t have that in our portfolio right now. So how do we find the skills? We have people who have some experience. We have people who have interests in these areas. It’s about nurturing that, giving them the opportunities to learn more. So it’s important that we start upskilling now for these technology classes that we know are coming. And so we’re recognising that, and that’s part of the…

people development element of what we do here. But the fact that we are integrated means that we as an asset management team get insight from what the investment team are looking at and what the development team are working on. So we get… a couple of years out, we get to see what’s likely to come to us and we can start preparing for that. So it’s really the advantage of that integration means we know what’s coming, we can prepare for it.

Giovanni Terranova (17:19)
We started with solar 15 years ago, 5 years ago we changed investment policies for the funds to allow investment in wind, in battery storage because as the energy transition is evolving we were aware that the generation profile of solar which is central to the energy transition needs to be complemented with

other technologies like wind and batteries and the complementarity in terms of seasonality but also in terms of daily production. So that’s why we started and again being integrated helped us a lot to move quickly from one technology to the other.

Adam Sroka (18:05)
And I’m just going to ask then, there’s a lot of complexity. How do you manage that from a systems and a processes point of view and from development all the way through to operation maintenance?

Jon Henderson (18:15)
Yeah, we do. A lot of the portfolio has been built through acquisition. And so you buy what’s on offer and you have to look at how do we take that and build it into our systems or build systems that can integrate that technology for us. We have, as I said, we’ve

140 operational assets in the UK, various different monitoring platforms and SCADA systems. And this kind of standardisation of that has been challenging. For the solar assets, we’ve actually built our own data aggregation and reporting facility. So that’s source agnostic.

Whatever equipment is installed at site, our system can take the data from it and collate it, present it, we can interrogate it. So we’ve got a really powerful tool there. And we’ve recently taken the decision to invest further in that and expand it so that we go further down the route of analytics. How do we use the data we’re producing to understand better what might happen in the future?

Historically a lot of the data that we generate is used to look backwards and issue reports. So telling people what has happened, which is an important part where we have investors, we have stakeholders who want to know how things are doing. But for us, when we think about maximising the return on the investment for the investor, the shareholder, it’s really about what can we understand from the data about what might happen next.

Yeah, we’re really proud of the system that we’re building and how we go about utilising that to plan for the future. So what can we do about machine learning to support the team? So it’s an additional tool for the teams to understand their assets and to make the right decisions for the whole lifecycle.

Adam Sroka (20:13)
That’s not a small investment. Having built a business and a career out of building exactly those kinds of systems, I’d absolutely love to sink my teeth into what you’re up to and come have a look under the covers. that’s not a small investment. That is a lot of people and really highly specialised skill sets and time. I think a lot of organisations like yours are scared of that and don’t

Giovanni Terranova (20:22)
you

Jon Henderson (20:24)
Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks

Adam Sroka (20:40)
and don’t invest. But the alternative is you end up in the world you described where you’ve got a myriad of SCADA systems and platforms. Growth through acquisition can be especially painful because you don’t know what decisions have been made up the chain. It’d be interesting to see how that develops over the years because you could get stuck really in the…

perpetual cycle of trying to fix and do the reporting and never eke out that next bit of performance. So it’s really interesting to hear that you’ve A) built it already and B) are committed to growing that because I think it’s an unusual position to take, but mostly because of fear and a lack of understanding.

Jon Henderson (21:15)
Yeah.

Giovanni Terranova (21:16)
you

Jon Henderson (21:17)
Yeah, and also, it’s fair to say in the wind area, we do use a third party system.

And then we have the challenge of integrating. If we want to present a portfolio view, how do we take the outputs from one system and from the wind system and then from the solar system, how do we aggregate that all to give a consistent view? But these are challenges that everybody who builds businesses the way we have will face. And I think I’d much rather own the solution and make it happen than rely on

the hope that third parties find solutions to this. I think by building a team of data engineers, data analysts within Bluefield, it gives us that competitive advantage. We can decide what are the priorities for us and we can direct our team at solving those problems that we see. I think the real focus has to be on forward-looking measurement.

When we have component failures, go back through the data, were there any markers? When we’ve had multiple component failures, the same component type, we can start to analyse what happened in the preceding 6 months, 12 months, 2 years, were there any markers that are consistent across those? It means we can then look at,

changing our maintenance regime, being more proactive in component replacement in the life cycle, those kind of things. So the less time we spend reporting data and the more we spend analysing is where the real value of adding happens, I think.

Adam Sroka (22:56)
Having spent many a late night fretting over trying to build reports, even simple reports like how much debt do I have? What are my liabilities and commitments for this asset over the next 10 years? And what’s my expected revenue? I mean, that’s actually a really difficult thing to build for a mixed portfolio. But having built it, once you’ve got that single view of things, it allows you to go and raise more debt and refinance. I guess having that level of control

Giovanni Terranova (22:59)
you

Adam Sroka (23:26)
Giovanni, like and insight in your own business, must make some of the financial decisions much, much easier because you’ve done that, the hard yards of building those reports and those analytics.

Giovanni Terranova (23:35)
It’s been an investment which you correctly pointed out because we started looking at data and how to improve the kind of intake of data and analysis. I think back, something like 2017 or something like that, we started to debate what to do and I like your point of fear because we spent like 6, 12 months…

just to debate what was the best route because indeed going one route or the other involves some risks and high risk and the direction of taking, the direction of trying to develop something is for our own platform. It is an important commitment, you’re absolutely right. It is an important commitment for the time from the financial point of view.

And it’s not always an easy task. But then once you have it, then you can have an analytical tool that is superior. And you own your own data. So that has been really important decision back then in 2017, 2018 when we started with this process. You know, I was thinking what you were saying. And indeed, what we are doing, we have a number of investment strategies.

One of the strategies to buy all the small medium assets that are underperforming, and then we buy them operational to then repower. And we have a strategy, for example, in Italy that we have acquired 45 assets in the short term, 24 months. And you acquire

small assets that come with no monitoring system or no data collection, nothing, or completely kind of basic systems. And the main challenge in these two years that we own these assets has been indeed to create a common monitoring platform that allows us now after two years to eventually take hold of the performance because the first two years these assets are.

I mean, we acquired assets that were really small, like 2, 3 megawatts, managed by some doctors and notaries. And they had no professional management and no monitoring. So the first few years, it was quite difficult for the asset management to get hold of the performance, how we can maximise. And particularly for those assets back in Italy, they have tariffs that are 200, 300 euro per megawatt hour.

Adam Sroka (26:18)
Wow.

Giovanni Terranova (26:18)
So every kind of outage has to be addressed really quickly because you are losing 200, 300 euros per megawatt hour. Now that we have majority, not all, but majority of portfolio now under the same monitoring platform with all the kind of consistent kind of collection of data, now you start to see in the reports that the performance is starting to pick up very much.

And in the last few cycles, we have weekly and monthly performance reports. You start to see in the last few months that all the red lights have turned into green, which was something we celebrated in the last few months indeed. It is part of the challenge. It tells how important it is to have a consistent and kind of…

Adam Sroka (26:53)
Horizon.

Giovanni Terranova (27:14)
same monitoring system.

Adam Sroka (27:18)
And I’ll not go on a rant here, but this is a subject close to my heart because obviously that’s what we do, right? It’s build these kinds of systems and…

Giovanni Terranova (27:20)
.

Adam Sroka (27:26)
It can be really scary. it can be, I’m saying on the call, it is a big investment, right? And then it’s not also, it’s not build it and forget it like software rots and you then need to pay to maintain it and keep it operational much like any asset. However, I think it’s one of the most asymmetric investments you can make in this space because like we’re dealing with an organisation that have spent billions on the portfolio and

The investment in the data platform, the analytics and the tools and all that is like a rounding error. It’s like Excel would just clear out compared to the total sum of the projects and the money they’ll make. And actually the uptick in the revenues they’ll make are just massively disproportionate to the cost of doing it. And I think we’ll see it, I personally hope, but I think we’ll see more

Organisations do what you’re doing over the next decade, realise that to get the additional edge, the more efficient portfolios, you’re going to need to do this stuff. I think I was very lucky that I started in batteries because they’re so data hungry and so complicated that you can’t run them like, like solar and wind have their challenges, but batteries just are nightmarish in comparison.

Giovanni Terranova (28:31)
Yes, indeed.

Adam Sroka (28:44)
actually, when you’re actively trading them, like 13, 14 markets in some cases, like trying to stack markets, optimise them, you enter a world very quickly where this doesn’t become a nice to have, it becomes a must have. Putting all that together into a unified platform that says, actually, do I want to invest in another battery? Or should I put that money in the next wind farm in a new territory? It’s something that unless you’re doing the hard yards now that you have done, just not going to be possible for organisations like Bluefield.

Giovanni Terranova (29:13)
Yeah, fully agree.

Adam Sroka (29:14)
I was really interested to hear about the underperforming assets and repowering. That’s, I think, a really interesting approach. What drove that decision? Because, my inkling, is that related to grid connections being quite difficult to get hold of? Or is it just a niche kind of skill set for you?

Giovanni Terranova (29:30)
Yeah, well, it’s really a combination of a number of market drivers and opportunities, starting first from back to where we started, the integration. We have a multidisciplinary team and back in 2017, we kind of experienced how powerful is integration because we took on highly underperforming

distress assets portfolio that required all the skill set in our teams. We kind of realised that we turn around this underperforming distress portfolio into a really good one and we made a very good investment and return for the investors. And that’s where we realised that actually there is a market opportunity and we can

exploit that opportunity thanks to our integration. So since then we started and as correctly you are saying the market opportunity becoming… is a bit overlooked by most of the investors and the operators because there’s a lot of greenfield but there is a growing kind of market of aging assets particularly in countries where the first wave of renewables happened. So if you look at

Germany, Italy, France, UK, a bit of Spain. These countries had a wave that dates back 15, in Germany almost 20 years ago. So you have assets that have a site, they have a grid connection, but they are on a technology that is dating back 15, 20 years ago. And so what we have seen, we have done many repowering, revamping, both in

solar and wind. And I would say less risky type of investment for some aspects, but more complex than Greenfield. Less risky because you pointed out, Adam, you already have the grid. So you have more chances of even being able to expand that capacity. Or at least you keep it as it is.

You change technology, improve the yield. You have a site which in wind, for instance, sites that are the first sites that have the highest wind speeds. So they are quite attractive sites. And the planning is, yes, you have to do the planning, but you have to think that it is easier because already the plant is there. And a number of governments, think about Germany, Italy, that is the one we look

for repowering, there is a simplified procedure to authorise. So it’s less risky for some points of view. It’s more complex though because you have to go through the normal cycle, so development, procurement of structure, but you have to also dismantle existing plants. So that adds a bit more complexity and it brings in also

the point of what you do with this equipment. You have to make sure also from kind of an ESG point of view what you do, how you reuse or maximise the use of these assets. So less risky, quite attractive market, more complex requires really a multidisciplinary skill set that we have and we are then carrying out a number of strategies that lead to repowering.

Adam Sroka (33:09)
I think it’s really very impressive. I guess, Jon, because there’s huge advantages of doing it the way you’re doing it, fully integrated. When you come to look at a site and say, that’s underperforming, does that come from your own benchmarks and the services team and looking at, well, for our assets, we know that we can achieve X and this is getting 0.6X or whatever? How does that thread together?

Jon Henderson (33:33)
Yeah,

so I think there are different things. There’s contractual expectations. So we’ve made promises. We have obligations to achieve certain levels. And I think There can be a focus on achievement of a target rather than a deep understanding of what the asset is capable of. And so what we’re trying to do is understand, look at the history, look at what the asset has done in the past and identify

what the trends are, the major outages are coming from, what is it that is the driver of underperformance? How long have we been seeing this? Was there something we could have spotted at an earlier date that we can utilise elsewhere now to better understand assets? So when we look at ongoing underperformance, it’s really about let’s fix what’s going wrong now, but let’s fix it for the long term.

What are the solutions that mean this problem doesn’t reoccur? And it may be that a certain component type is not adequate for the environment it’s situated in. And we change that. It may be that actually the component’s failing, but it’s because of the connecting components. And they’re not the right ones. So how do we address that? And what does that mean for the wider portfolio? So do we have this component in the same configuration elsewhere? And therefore, do we need to look at?

When will we expect to see degradation there and how do we address it sooner? Clearly, as assets age, they don’t perform as well as they do at the outset. So at what point do you start to think about a major overhaul of key components to restore performance to higher levels? These are all decisions that you have to consider the long-term revenue from the asset

and weigh these things up in the balance. It may be certain assets you decide the return on investment is better to sweat the asset. On others, it may make sense to do earlier than you would have expected to do a major revamping of the asset and replace key components because that will give you the best whole life value, the return on the whole life investment. And I think that’s…

Sometimes the challenging part of O&M and asset management is the desire to fix things now is always really strong. Get things returned to service, get them operating and producing and balancing that up against what’s the long-term best return on investment. That’s always the challenge we face. We could spend lots of money now replacing components. Does that give us the best value in the long term?

That’s the asset management piece. So field service engineers will always want to fix kit and get it operating. That’s great. 99 times out of 100, that’s what you need to do. The asset management piece is understanding what the impact long term is of that and evaluating the whole lifecycle. So that’s the fun part of it as well.

Adam Sroka (36:41)
Does that turn into a great big fight or do you just get final say on that front and put your foot down?

Jon Henderson (36:48)
No, I mean, that’s one of the joys of an integrated team is that there isn’t fighting over what’s the best solution, that’s for sure. Any way, you’re going to find different opinions. You know, the great thing is that people feel that sense of ownership. We all work for Bluefield. So

There’s that sense that these are our assets and we’re all working to do the best thing for them. There are conversations about when’s the right time to invest significant sums in an overhaul versus keeping a plant running for lower cost. I think the strength of Bluefield is that we do have that full life cycle view and we can work together to…

to maximise the value that we’re obtaining.

Adam Sroka (37:39)
Yeah, I imagine there’s like a special kind of pride you can feel because you’re doing all of it and you get the advantage of getting the holistic view but also quicker feedback cycles. Like you can very quickly get everyone involved and make the decision. That’s quite cool. So I guess like what’s next? What’s happening next at Bluefield? Anything in particular, any projects you’re excited about coming up or?

Giovanni Terranova (37:57)
Thank

I would say that again we are fully integrated so in a way we play on a different kind of market. As a fund manager I would say that the most interesting project for the future we just launched the Pan-European Investment Fund on renewables, solar, wind and battery storage across the key European markets and it’s focused on

Greenfield, but also equally on repowering and revamping. Continuing with the work we have done by expanding into a multi-country fund. As a developer, we are very excited of a platform that we have set up on the batteries. So we have been developing batteries in multiple European countries. And so UK.

Italy is starting now, Spain, looking at Germany. That is quite exciting as well for us. you said, battery is kind of really becoming a key element in the energy mix. And is, in my view, I see very much is pretty similar to the feeling that I had when we started 15 years ago in solar. It is the kind of central We knew, and we were one of the few saying,

This is a great investment for institutional investors in solar. This will be the centerpiece of the energy transition. And I would say we were right on that. But now with batteries, you see the same crucial pivotal role and different features, quite different features, but really essential. And the growth that we’ll have will be really interesting and being able to manage and invest in that

sector starting from development as we are doing now is very exciting.

So these are probably kind of one of the couple of interesting areas of development and investment for the next kind of year or so.

Adam Sroka (40:06)
Amazing. Then GB specifically, I guess, what are your thoughts on where the GB market’s going and are you looking at co-location for some of your sites or some of your assets behind the meter stuff?

Jon Henderson (40:19)
Clearly that’s coming. The more renewables that goes onto the grid, the more the requirement for batteries is apparent. It’s something that we’re looking at. I know there’s development ongoing. We’d be reviewing the asset base that we have. Where are the opportunities? Is there grid capacity still?

Maybe it’s just behind the meter, maybe it’s not, you know, what are the opportunities? So I think that poses challenges for us as asset management. As I said at the start, we don’t currently have batteries. We have to be ready for that. And I think as it becomes a major focus of the industry. Bluefield wants to be part of that and as operators, we need to be ready. Batteries, more complex, lots of data.

Different options on optimisers and so on, how do we be part of that and how do we get to grips with that as quickly as possible. Yeah, really big opportunity and the focus is now on being ready to take advantage of it.

Adam Sroka (41:21)
Really exciting.

This has been a really interesting conversation. I think Bluefield, you’re doing some really exciting stuff. It’s, yeah, unique in the way you’ve approached building the business. I mean, as a bootstrapped sort of entrepreneur myself, like building a business from the ground up, I can reflect some of the pains, although slightly different, I guess. Excited to see where you go.

Before we let anyone leave though, I always like to ask if people in the audience want to find out more about Bluefield or yourselves, or if there’s anything you want to plug or promote, where should we direct them?

Giovanni Terranova (41:55)
We are very active on LinkedIn with the corporate page and individually as well. We have also a fortnightly newsletter where we bring up articles, opinions, news on our investments, our presence in conferences where you can come and meet us. So if listeners want to…

join and receive the newsletter they can go on the the bluefieldgroup.com and subscribe and they will have all the kind of the information, articles, news, around energy transition and investment.

Jon Henderson (42:35)
Yeah, from the asset management side, we’re definitely keen to grow our network with the industry. You’ll see more of Bluefield Asset Management and Operations team at conferences,

always happy to have conversations there on opportunities to particularly focusing on the areas of performance improvements, data analytics, these are really crucial areas to us. So always open to conversations on those.

Adam Sroka (43:03)
Thank you very much, it’s been an absolute pleasure and all the best at Bluefield.

Giovanni Terranova (43:09)
Thank you. Thank you.

Jon Henderson (43:09)
very much.

Adam Sroka (43:14)
Really interesting organisation if you’re not familiar with Bluefield. They started as an investment fund, but they’ve become like fully integrated doing the operations, the construction, the planning, and it gives them a really unique perspective on assets and how to optimise the value from them. And one of the few organisations I’ve seen that are doing brownfield like re-empowering of sites and taking underperforming assets and

making them really work. Lots of advantages to doing it that way. But obviously for me, the most exciting part of the conversation was talking about the fact that they’ve invested in the data platform, they’re building their own analytics, they’ve done the hard yards to develop the data platform that’s really going to make things work for them. And they see the huge return on investment that that brings. So fantastic episode. Looking forward to speaking to them some more.