Hypercube Podcast Transcript

Title: Building a High-Impact Team for Energy Sector Challenges

Host: Adam Sroka
Guest: Steven Meersman

Intro: Welcome to the Hypercube podcast, where we explore the cutting edge of data and AI in the energy and utility sectors. I’m your host, Adam Shrocker, founder of Hypercube, a strategic technology consultancy, supporting asset owner operators, traders, route to market providers, and energy services companies unlock the power of data and AI.

Join me as I sit down with experts from across the energy industry to uncover how they are navigating today’s data driven challenges. And without further ado, let’s get into today’s episode. 

Adam Sroka: Hello, and welcome back to the Hypercube podcast. I’m delighted today to be joined by Steven Meersman from Zenobe. Steven, would you like to give an introduction for the audience? 

Steven Meersman: Yeah, sure. So yeah, Steven Meersman, founder director of Zenobe. On Zenobe, we’re a owner and operator of large grid scale batteries, as well as a turnkey service provider in heavy duty electric mobility. 

Adam Sroka: Fascinating. I think that undersells it a bit though, doesn’t it? Because Zenobe is a really interesting business. There’s some of the interesting things you do with like end of life batteries. And I guess for the audience that maybe don’t know Zenobe so well, do you want to just expand a bit on some of the cool and wonderful things? 

Steven Meersman: Yeah. So maybe I’ll just go in a bit through the chronology, right?

So Zenobe started in early 2017 as one of the first. Developers of grid connected batteries in the UK, we developed our skill set in, I guess on one side, the electrical engineering of how do you get these things connected, planned, built, keep them operating. And then also on the sort of data analytics side, how do you maximize the optimization of the various services you can provide with batteries?

And then thirdly, how do you get these things financed and how do you get banks involved in that whole process? So to do three things. That we bring together from the three founders. And we’ve eventually kept that going throughout the entire organization now. We quickly learned about two years later that while we were very busy solving a first mile problem on the electricity grid with wind, then getting, hitting a choke point on the electrical grid and the electrons not being able to pass on from Scotland to England, we could actually also solve a last mile problem or a new last mile problem that was emerging in the form of electric buses, right?

Many people don’t know this, but a typical bus stop was about 200, 300 buses. And if you electrify with that and you don’t manage that peak load is about one to two empire state buildings popping up in your backyard. So the grid isn’t really ready for that. So what we saw is that these skills of how do you get connected.

How do you use maybe batteries to reduce peak loads and solve constraints? And how do you, with an attractive financing proposition, turn that into a full time key service so the customer can focus on their core job? Because bus operators have been going for an interesting time with COVID, government changes, and now also technology changes allow them to focus on.

Customer and us doing all the gnarly bits in the background to move along on the energy transition. Now, as you rightly pointed out, getting them charges only one bit. The second bit is the bus does about 250 miles a day and needs to do that for 15, in some places, even 25 years. And the batteries don’t necessarily last that long or what they do, but they can’t do the 250 miles anymore, or you end up carrying a bit of dead weight around.

So how do you deal with that midlife replacement? And we said let’s turn it into a subscription, effectively similar to what people have done with aircraft engines and shipping containers and other things. And say we will guarantee a minimum capacity sort of power when and where you need it.

And the reason we could do that is because we could reuse the battery at the end of its first life on the bus, right at the heavy duty application and put it into a secondary application. Now, initially we thought it was going into the grid scale batteries, but that didn’t quite happen for various reasons that we can go into, but we found that you can actually decarbonize other hard to decarbonize sectors like construction and sites.

Film shoots they have the noise and other challenges. We did the massive attack act one and a half thing in Bristol recently with second life batteries and affordable containerized units. We’ve got quite a few of those running around now. We’re helping power with select the building of nuclear power plants.

We were on several film shoots at the moment. We’re doing some festivals. We were powering the Xtreme E electric. Raleigh and Sahara desert and various other places, creating a full DC methanol, hydrogen, solar powered micro grid. So lots of fun stuff, but real. And I think this is really the important point.

We firmly believe that for mass adoption, what’s ecologically sustainable needs to be financially sustainable. So when you hear us talk, we talk a lot about the numbers and making it real, because that’s what we believe is required To really get things more. 

Adam Sroka: I love the pragmatic approach.

And a previous mentor of mine used to say that as soon as we make it financially more profitable to, to do the right thing will start to happen more quickly and the money and the investment will follow. So I think, yeah, it’s nice to have the ideals and the vision, but you, reality at the moment is people need to make money out of this or it’s not going to attract the investment, it’s going to take longer.

You’ve talked through a load of stuff there that’s not easy to do. Yeah. Everything from, yeah, like battery analytics to operations and confession. I applied to a job at Zenobe a good few years back now, and don’t think I was successful, unfortunately. Sorry to hear that. It’s all right. But yeah, it was a company that was on my radar for a while, and I applied to a data job quite a way back, but I wanted to get into must take some kind of team to be able to pull off the operational complexity, but also the technical complexity of what you’re up to.

Could you expand on how you grow such a diverse high school team? 

Steven Meersman: I don’t know if you watched Ted Lasso recently or a while back, but there’s this whole thing about Total Football, right? You’ve got different people who are specialists in certain positions, but they need to understand how to work in a team.

So you, when you train them, you make them work on some of the other positions as well. And I think in a way, one of our new product people also described as T shaped individuals, where you’ve got a very deep specialism, but you can still have sufficient general problem solving understanding to be able to deal with other specialists, right?

And come to a total solution. I think that’s really what’s made, I think, us successful to date is bringing that together. That if you look at going all the way back to the founders, Nicholas coming in with very deep merchant banking, corporate finance, fundraising experience, James having done a turnaround at a few startups before, but also having gone decades of consulting for the large utilities, network operators in us, Australia, UK.

And then myself coming from an engineering and a trading background, having been part of joining the team that set up AES energy storage, as we called it back in the day, now Fluence, then EOS, and now Zenobe. So that technical knowledge, you really need those three things to come together to come up with a total solution because what we saw happening both in batteries and on the grid and on the transport network is that.

People were solving problems in tiny boxes, right? Each problem got solved in the next box. The total solution that came out was suboptimal, right? And that’s why bringing everything together and looking at it here, realistically, you can do a lot of cool things. For example, working with some of our operators to train their drivers to use less electricity, right?

If you use less electricity, then we need to push less copper under the ground. For our jet night, you have less impact on the grid. That’s one example. Other examples with our engineers who’ve come up with a way to Use like the bollards you normally use to protect the charge. So actually we can create something more of an envelope and then that can serve to catch the charging lead.

So nobody runs over them. Like it’s lots of these sort of tiny. Practical improvements, but that’s only possible if you’ve got a team of different experts coming together. I think a lot of that really resonates. 

Adam Sroka: We try to run a consultancy here. You’re always trying to match like the skills of the people that we have to the jobs we have and actually be T shaped.

It’s something we talk about a lot and there’s a lot of stuff about the T shaped engineer. So I can see how that does naturally just extend to like other parts of the business. It must make for some interesting leadership challenges though. How was your like leadership style or your leadership team?

Oh to take that in because I imagine you’ve got to be quite tight knit and close, right? 

Steven Meersman: Yeah, I think it’s been a challenge. If you look at with any organization, you go from zero or well, from one or two to 12, I think there’s sort of an inflection point there. Then somewhere around 50, 75, a hundred that’s another thing.

And then yeah, 150, 200, 300 again. So the things that worked in the past don’t work. To solve the plateau or the challenge. So we’ve had to adapt, but I think there’s also value in leaning into the things that work well, rather than tossing everything overboard when you’re trying to address the challenge.

I think a lot of that growth needs to be digested as well. So if I look at we’ve added quite a lot of people over the last year. I think. It’ll be a bit flatter now, except for some of the new regions where we’re very heavily investing. Yeah, I would say it’s definitely had to, but I think some of those things that you get in the beginning are really important to keep right.

Keeping the comms lines short, you have to be in the detail, but that doesn’t mean you, you micromanage. So those sort of attention points, but then also creating a very tight knit culture, I think in the beginning. It comes organically because you’re all spending a lot of time together, but as the organization gets bigger, you need to do that in some cases a bit more formally, right?

All hands and town halls and all that fun stuff. But because even more importantly, as that sort of that layer of functional leaders or business area leaders that, that they do that as well. And they know they need to do that. For instance, we went from 25 to 86 during COVID, fully remote.

We’re still dealing with some indigestion from on culture as a result of that, I would argue, but we spent a lot of time making sure the teams did get together virtually or otherwise, from Digital wine tasting events to pub quizzes and another sort of fun stuff. But I find that organized fun that a bigger group doesn’t really work.

So what we’ve done there is give sub teams budgets to say, look, we’re going to throw together five random people who probably don’t interact all that often. And here’s a budget to go do something fun like axe throwing or darts or go karting or whatever and try and get people to mingle, particularly in this sort of hybrid working mode.

If you’re doing this sort of creative stuff and you’re trying to solve problems, physical proximity does help a lot. If you told people they had to get back in the office five days a week, that they’d probably have opinions about that. So you have to find that balance and sometimes just experiment and say, Oh, that works.

Oh, that didn’t work. And course crap. 

Adam Sroka: And again, yeah, I agree with that. On our journey, I truly believe that as much as the technology is great for work and remote, we can do podcasts like this I have a really interesting tool, but there’s magic in the air, like when you meet someone, there’s just something about being in the room with other people that I think makes a huge difference.

Steven Meersman: Yeah, I love it on those days, particularly when our office is starting to get a bit too small and everyone’s in at the same time, there’s like literally a buzz in the office, right? You can see. The interaction of people going over to each other’s desk or standing at the, a water cooler or a coffee maker and saying, Hey, There’s that one thing that we’ve been struggling with.

Let’s really spend some time and fix it now type thing. And I think that’s got to make sure we don’t lose that when I was opting all these new technologies. 

Adam Sroka: And actually, yeah. So tomorrow, one of the leaders in our business and I have. I’ve just booked up the whole day and we’re going to go stand in front of a real whiteboard with real pens and just draw stuff for the day.

And I think that’s going to make such a difference because we’ve got Miro, we’ve got all these online collaboration tools, but it’s just not the same. I guess like for your, so there’s a lot of different moving parts in your business, but I’d be interested to know about some of the technologies that I guess enable ZeroDB to do what it does, especially around the data analytics side.

Could you expand on some of that? 

Steven Meersman: I think the It’s a complex journey, right? Obviously you first need to capture the data reliably and consistently to do a lot of stuff. And then, yeah, you need to then have a team that you can focus on a specific set of problems, and show them what the value is.

And I think that’s a product operation management is really important. This is what it means for the customer. How do we go about that now? And sometimes it’s the other way where the analytics team says, there’s something funny here, I don’t know what that is, I’m going to spend some time on that.

So you need to make sure to have those times of reflection and type of creative inspiration. But I think a lot of it is, again is that latter bit, it’s having that time for creative inspiration where, cause we’re getting all these data streams from different sources, right? And. If it wasn’t an ana, one, my two was meeting our analytics team, come in and saying something weird on this charging date on this first side, where it was nine buses.

The weather is the same, the bus is the same, the route is the same, but the energy consumption is so drastically different. You might have entered, we weren’t even monitoring the buses that it was, we saw the draw on the charges was very different. And eventually we went back to. Kevin the engineering manager for that type of with with stage coach, and he’s Oh, I think you’ve worked out our driver schedule.

That’s Bob or Gary or whatever his name was. Yeah. Cause he, he drives like that and he comes in every Tuesday or whatever, like something completely random. Unless you’ve got that analytics person to have time to look at these things. Cause. Technically it wasn’t a critical issue. So I said, Oh, I’m going to spend some time on this.

And then to bring that to the business and the business then to have the trust in the analytics person and say, Oh yeah, that’s, and have the relationship with the customer that you’re working together to, to achieve something. Then these bits don’t happen. So I’d say the biggest tools, I’m not going to list a coding language or a specific piece of software.

It’s communication and time 

Adam Sroka: For Forge, more than anything. And a lot more of us online, just Paris that I think I always think that the tech’s actually the easy bit, like understanding the problem and communicating it properly and getting people on board and all that. That’s actually really difficult and if you can solve the communication bit, the rest of it tends to solve itself.

Lots of very wise people. 

Steven Meersman: The other bit is also, I talked about these organizational inflection points, right? In the beginning it was okay, we have a problem or a crisis or whatever, and then everyone in the business just suddenly stops doing what they’re doing, comes in.

Let’s fix it. And in a way that’s great. There’s some even large organizations that managed to do that really well. And not an obvious example, but back in the old days. I did some work with BP and I was impressed how they were able to just pull these sort of swap teams together from different parts of the organization or somebody from finance in Houston, somebody from engineering and that thing, pull them all together for a couple of months, do a project, but really get it done, right?

Stop multitasking. No, your job is now the project until the project is done. Nothing else exists. And then after that, these teams would disband and go back on their merry way. And then I thought that was really fascinating. And I hope as we grow, we were able to have that nimbleness, but at the same time, as you get to the inflection point now, you can’t do that.

Because there’s so much volume of stuff that needs to keep moving. And on the other side, you’re trying to put more structure and process in place. And that sometimes requires, yeah, smashing down the Lego tower and then resorting to bricks and pieces. Putting it back together and we’ve started, try what we’ve tried to do to address that, I sort have functions that purely focus on the day to day and then have a few people that really focus on taking a step back and looking at the landscape, the forest versus the trees, but then involving the functions again and saying, Hey, you guys are the expert.

We’ve spotted a problem in here. We need some. We can help drive the process forward, but we need somebody from your team to deliver the content to, yeah to improve the process or whatever. And I think that’s, yeah, we’re still learning. It’s it’s interesting. 

Adam Sroka: It does lead into a bit of a question around, we talked about being like whole energy individuals and T shaped.

Is there just a really high barrier to being effective in this industry because of how complicated complex is and how. Abroad, a lot of these like seemingly simple problems end up reaching because our experiences that like, we find techies that just land into energy do struggle a bit with things that they thought would be straightforward or solved by like simple methods in maybe some other industries.

Actually, you can’t get into that. infinite knot very quickly of other dependencies. 

Steven Meersman: Yeah, we go taking a step back, if you look at the energy industry it’s obviously it’s heavily regulated, right? But also due to its very nature, right? If you look at the electricity grid, it’s a bunch of wires in almost instantaneously connected to lots of Various energy users to the plug point that’s charging your microphone all the way down to size of all A are instantaneously connected.

And let’s think about that for a second. And everything needs to be orchestrated on that 50 times a second drum beat, because if that starts deviating the lights go out, and we’ve seen that happen a couple of years back in UK, when we had that brownout where that was at a gas plant or a coal plant went down from a lightning strike.

A wind farm thought it was something wrong, something strange was going on, shut itself off and then suddenly a hospital in London lost power and that all happened in what, 400 milliseconds or something ludicrous. So saying that the industry is ossified and very inwardly focused because of all that heavy regulation ignore some of the physical realities of what they’re dealing with, right?

If you fiddle with something, it may have a far reaching end. But I think the, there’s a very much a need for outside perspectives. To drive it forward. And I think the trick there is to define your problem small enough, right? Because if you, like you say, you fiddle with one thing, they say, Oh, but then this thing, things, and then that thing.

And before you know it, you’ve run down a rabbit hole and you no longer, the problem you’re trying to solve becomes impossible because it’s become so large. So where I think the real skilled managers or engineers or product or data people come in and say hold on. Yes, there’s all this context, but let’s laser focus, zoom in on this one thing that we can fix today that we can do something about and just do that and then worry about the other bit tomorrow.

But what I would say is if you want to come in from outside the industry, now’s really the time, right? Because the energy industry is going through one of its biggest disruptions of the last hundred years, right? This whole energy transition to non dispatchable intermittent. Cleaner, we suddenly do have storage on the grid, right?

All these things happening. And at the same time, for the first time in several decades, electricity demand might start going up again, right? Because of all these EVs being connected. And we’ve got way more data than before, right? There’s startups now installing equipment online so that you can unlock spare capacity and transmission wires, right?

With. For the cost of a 500 ball that collects some data, right? That’s cool. But those ideas are from coming, like say from the fringe, from adjacent industries coming in and now is really the time, right? The energy and the transport network are merging, the energy sector going for one of its biggest changes, the transport system on its own going for one of its biggest changes.

If you want to come in from the outside, I’d say now’s really the time. 

Adam Sroka: Yeah. Okay. So what do you think, follow up on that, what do you think the biggest challenge or opportunity is for the sector, both sort of the wider energy sector and your fleet operations and transport sector? 

Steven Meersman: Let’s start. I think there’s lots of different challenges, right?

I think. If you look at what’s happening on a macro level with lots of the major OEMs scaling back their production. Obviously they’re not doing that to be obtuse or difficult. They’re doing that because they’re not seeing the demand. So why is that happening? In a regulatory, there’s a lot of political and regulatory uncertainty.

So people are saying which direction is this all going to go? So everybody’s holding their breath a little bit. And then you have. We passed that initial over exuberance in the energy trends where I said, Oh, it’s all going to be wonderful. It’s all going to be quick and it’s all going to be easy.

And people maybe raised loads of money for ideas that probably weren’t as good. And then. overextended and weren’t pragmatic as some others and failed, and sometimes spectacularly, if we look at OEMs in, in, in the bus sector in the US we had 16 OEMs in the nineties. And now we have two of the, all the companies that specced, how many are still left, right?

So I think there’s a bit of cleanup happening, right? But I think realism is coming in. And I think that’s a much more durable source of power. Saying yeah, people did these things and sometimes spectacularly failed, but there was some interesting bits there as well that we can pick up and build something better with, something more sustainable and something that will, yeah, that we’ll be able to run a marathon, not just a sprint.

Again, that’s that’s the background that we’re acting against. And in terms of what are the biggest challenges, I think how do you navigate in an environment that’s that noisy? And stay focused on, on doing what you need to do. And I think it’s being very pragmatic. If you look at when we started the business, we didn’t raise loads of money to then burn on staff costs.

No, we said, look, we want to raise a small amount to buy these assets, get cash flows from that. And then in a very old fashioned way, we’ll pay people from our operating networks and if our operating cash flows grow well, then we can hire more people. In the beginning, sometimes meant the founders didn’t pay themselves, but that’s a different story.

But I think it’s that sort of realism and cynicism is what’s kept us alive during some interesting periods for R& D. The stuff happening in Europe at the moment, COVID and various other elements where we could in theory, postpone growth, but we would be alive. We wouldn’t have to we wouldn’t implode.

And I think that’s, that discipline is very important in today’s environment. I would say that’s one of the big challenges for any startup or scale up at the moment is how do you. Keep that discipline while trying to meet all the requirements of your various stakeholders, right? Staff, customers shareholders, the regulatory environment you’re operating in.

Yeah, 

Adam Sroka: if you figure that one out, please let us know, because yeah, it’s not quite straightforward. I know that pay at the odds, no paycheck month, but it’s, I think it’s all about having confidence to back yourself sometimes and knowing that it will come right. In the end, because there’s, everything’s obvious in hindsight, right?

And you can say, Oh, we should have done that. We should have done this. But when you’re in the weight of it, 

Steven Meersman: There’s a, I hate to call to various people, but. Bezos comment around, what is this a reversible, what would he call it? Is it a reversible position or a non reversible one? And obviously deciding which it is, it’s difficult.

The non reversible one the reversible ones don’t fuss about it too much. The guys in the office always joke that I referenced the Simpsons at these times. Is this a problem for current Stephen or for future Stephen? And I think that’s really important. You can’t solve everything today.

There’s just not enough hours in the day. So you need to be able to decide. Where do you need to let it burn a little bit and focus because the switching costs are too great, right? If you pick something up and you put it down again on an assembly line, the moment you take it off the assembly line in a factory and you then have to later bring it back, it costs six times as much.

And that’s something that in business with all the technologies we’ve got today, where everybody needs to be reachable at any point in time, we forget about that cost sometimes because a factor of six, that’s quite insane, right? And I think. If you factor that into a random email or a notification that pops on your phone, that hasn’t cost you one minute, that’s cost you six.

I think we behave a lot differently in the office, or at all. 

Adam Sroka: Yeah, I think, yeah, I think just the personal productivity, being distraction free really helps me. Anyway, just turn everything off, turn all your notifications off and check in and make sure people know that’s your cadence.

Steven Meersman: My favorite Is the Eurostar right? Cause when I’m on the Eurostar, I have no signal. The wifi is not great. Sorry. I’m a regular customer, but it has to be set. But I have two hours where I can focus on one thing, right? As long as I’ve downloaded it beforehand. That’s great. It’s the most productive time of the week.

Adam Sroka: Really appreciate you having been here today. I think there’s definitely room for a round two at some point, if you’d be up for it and talk a little bit more. Here, especially founder to founder, like you’re, yeah, the startup journey, I find that my spiel to a lot of the people at our stage is that I know what the job spec says, but we need to just say, get stuck in because the business is going to be very different every quarter.

And as we grow and scale, We need to be on that journey. 

Steven Meersman: The bus thing is another example, right? We, the bus thing, we had a first phone call with that bus company in February, 2017, before we incorporated. And we didn’t think that problem wasn’t real in the market until two, three years later.

And now it’s 70 percent of our business, right? That random phone call. 

Adam Sroka: And yeah, you’ve got to have the wisdom and the kind of perspective to see it. And. The kind of survivability to get to the point where it actually becomes a need.

Steven Meersman: Everything is execution. 

Adam Sroka: Steven,  it’s been amazing. One question I always ask before I let anyone go is if people want to find out more about you or Zenobe or there’s something you would like to promote or plug, where should we be pointing them?

Steven Meersman: Obviously I’m on LinkedIn, so you can find me there and send me a message. I do usually respond there for some time. And Zenobe, yeah, Zenobe.com is a good place to start. Also, our LinkedIn page is a little bit more active with up to date common content. And yeah we’ve always got a. Events calendar there as well.

So if you want to talk to us about, just reach out to me or anyone else in the team, right? 

Adam Sroka: Amazing. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much. And yeah, maybe try and get you on again. 

Steven Meersman:  Looking forward to it. Thanks a lot. 

Outro: Thank you for tuning in to the Hypercube podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, I want to dive deeper into the AI in the energy sector.

Be sure to subscribe. So you never miss an episode. We’re always eager to hear from our listeners. So if you have any questions, any topics you’d like us to cover or feedback, you can reach out to us on LinkedIn or check out our website at wearehypercube.com. And remember the energy landscape is evolving fast.

Stay ahead of the curve with the latest strategies and solutions right here on the Hypercube podcast. See you next time.