Scaling battery storage: assets, markets and AI

Adam Sroka (00:16)
Hello and welcome back to the Hypercube podcast. I am joined by Dan Moore today, who is head of asset management at Root Power. Dan, thanks for joining us again.

you would be so kind as to introduce yourself for the audience and tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, what Root Power are up to.

Dan Moore (00:36)
So yeah, thanks for the introduction. So for those of you who haven’t heard my name or met me or seen me around the show, so my name is Dan Moore. I’m the head of asset management at Root Power. Root Power are a battery storage IPP predominantly in the UK. I’ll touch a little bit about them as we kind of get into it from a whistle stop tour of a little bit about me.

So I actually started my journey in power generation actually when I left school. well actually my father used to work for a company called the General Electric Company, who if you weren’t aware, were probably one of the earliest manufacturers of power generation equipment, particularly in the UK, sort of large industrial machines. And I just remember as a kid being walking around his workshop.

as it were, just being fascinated by the world of power generation, really. So it’s the old cliche of following in a father’s footsteps. So, yeah, when I when I left school, I went and did an engineer technical engineering certificate in electrical engineering. I then landed an apprenticeship with a company who specialized in the manufacturing repair of what we call in the sort of power generation world large rotating equipment.

which for the layman that doesn’t know really what that means is what we’re talking about is your typical sort of generators that were attached to gas and steam turbines. But we’re talking machines that kind of go upwards of like, 800 megawatts, one generator. So big, bits of kit, massive compared to the size of, you know, sort of a 50 megawatt battery that we see these days. And the technology even then was sort of quite, quite impressive because a lot of them were kind of hydrogen cooled and things like that, which was,

It’s basically like a big bomb with electrical circuit inside it, right? It sounds quite scary, but all safe. So yeah, I did an apprenticeship there. So sort of four year hands-on, worked on the tools as it were, and then eventually kind of progressed my way through into project and then eventually operations and management. My transition into renewables.

really when renewables actually started making an appearance on the grid, as we started switching off, coal and the UK generally started to move away from fossil fuels. Really, the company that I worked for at the time kind of had to adapt in order to kind of keep their legacy going. So we moved into…

manufacturing and repair of wind turbine generators and so on. So we kind of moved, that’s how I ended up falling into the renewable space. From a batteries point of view, that happened in my career in 2017. So I moved, or should I say took an opportunity to work for a company called Off Grid Energy, which at the time were sort of early pioneers, I should say, in the world of battery storage. We were building

very, very small battery units and micro grids. We actually installed a behind the meter battery for UPS in Camden, the UPS being the delivery firm that is. They had a fleet of electronic vehicles for the delivery. They wanted to kind of go all net zero and green, know, particularly around London with it being such a congested space and the congestion charges and so on. So they had a fleet of EV vehicles and the grid.

grid connection that they had at the site, couldn’t support their sort of ambitions for EVs and we came in and, designed a behind the meter battery energy storage solution for them and we grid tied it as well. So they also had the benefit of being able to, you know, export and be paid for it. And it kind of grew from there really. And then went to work for Gorse Street Capital, who I’m sure everyone on this call should know or hopefully know.

If you don’t know who Gaw Street are, of course, they were the first London Stock Exchange listed energy storage firm in the UK. They’ve got quite a sizable portfolio actually across five different grids. think it is or at least it was at the time when I was there. And then left Gaw Street to work for, well, at the time it wasn’t known as Root Power, but it was Elum Energy, part of the Elum Group, and they set up Root Power

which is kind of where I am today as the head of asset management. And there I look after, well, eventually we’ll look after their portfolio of energy storage assets.

Adam Sroka (04:38)
you’ve really covered the breadth of early stage stuff, manufacturing, legacy or traditional energy generation through to where we live and breathe today in storage and some of the fast moving technology in that space. And I’ve a number of companies, we love Corstree, they’re an incredible company to work with and we wish them all the best. And Elam is interesting, one of my earliest

for raising to storage was modeling some landfill gas stuff with Elim group, one party and group at some point anyway, was any every small desk study I did as a part of another company. But yeah, it’s been a very interesting journey and it gives you a really like you’ve got a really broad perspective, I guess, of of the industry rooted, pun intended, in storage and where we are today.

I guess, what, does that play out as being an asset manager today and as head of asset management? Like, what does your role cover in practice? And how was that journey coming to bear on the role you’re in?

Dan Moore (05:50)
Yeah, sure. It’s very, different from from my time at Gore Street, definitely Gore Street having quite a large fleet of operational assets. So it’s gone from really being an operational asset manager, certainly from the days of Gore Street into route being a lot more focused on making our projects as efficient as possible really for when they eventually come into operations.

We have three projects that are currently under advanced stages of, you know, design and construction. And we also have one that’s very, very soon to go to go operational. certainly my time at the moment has been fed working alongside our very, capable delivery team and also planning team. And really.

using the experience from my early days in battery storage and particularly at Gore Street as well to really help shape our portfolio of projects at Root Power to make sure that when they go live, they’re designed well as possible, thoughtful for the O &M teams. It’s the technology that we’re selecting going to be suitable for whatever happens in kind of 20.

20, 30 years over the life of these projects. And, I don’t have a crystal ball, I don’t know what NISO is gonna, plan next and, whether that’s a new revenue stream or, they’re gonna change something with how batteries operate on the grid or anything like that. But, we can only, we can only make our decisions on what we know today and what we know is gonna happen that’s in the pipeline. So certainly a lot of the time at the moment, it’s certainly with me and the team at Root Power is spent really making sure that the projects that we,

have developed with design and deliver, you know, meet, the performance, of what we what we know is going to happen certainly over in the long term and whether that be, sort of making sure that the technology we choose and the battery is capable for something like the new suite of services, we’ve recently had quick reserve and of course now again, even more recently than that slow reserve, so does we’ve got black start capabilities coming on particularly so like NISO.

Pathfinder projects, so again, is the technology, that we’re purchasing ultimately capable of delivering that, does it fit in, and all of the other things, does it fit within the planning consents, whether that’s from a noise perspective or, visual impact, et cetera, et cetera. So, there’s a lot of things I can take sort of my experience from operating projects and really feeding that into the development team to make sure that they’re off to the best possible start when we eventually bring them into operation.

.

Adam Sroka (08:15)
And it’s,

yeah, you’ve talked there about like how the nature of the role changes so much.

It’s funny that when I ask asset managers the similar questions like what does the rolling tower, what do do often get the similar vibe that like it is about being responsive to what’s in front of you and what you’ve got on the situation. and I chaired the, like a veterans panel back at the asset management summit. And there was effectively the theme of the whole panel was like majority of the hard bit is setting yourself up for success. So good handovers, good documentation, good systems.

that can be a lot the sticking point and actually a lot of the role ends up being unpicking the bad handovers and things that have been done in the past. But you touched there on well actually the nature of job changes as well because not only is the technology progressing at a rate but like you were building megawatt scale systems back when it was considered quite ambitious to be that size and now we’re looking at new markets all the time like have have investors kept pace with that and have like

commercial models and everything kept pace with the nature of the work you do because it is very technical and deep.

Dan Moore (09:27)
It is yeah, I mean, if we go back to the days of off grid energy, when we were, as you say, kind of building or taking to investors, this this new technology that is, as we know it now battery energy storage, nobody, really understood it, whether that was, your traditional high street banks, as it were, or you sort of, your more typical asset lenders, like close brothers, and people like that, it really was this

dark art that is kind of how do we make money out of essentially what is stored energy. It’s not like, my days of like generators where you just had base load generation that was just ploughing electricity into the grid that was kind of paid on a per megawatt hour basis. That really hasn’t changed from a battery’s point of view. But as I said, like all things new, if it’s not well understood, investors tend to be a lot more risk averse about it, at least until they understand the fundamentals of it.

And you’re right, as sort of the technology has matured and it’s got quite a presence on the grid now, it’s a very, very, very well understood technology. Lenders are very, very happy to lend against it from a risk point of view. And we’ve also just got a lot more market fundamentals and data behind us that kind of help support that. There’s tools that are out there to any asset owner now, whether that be through Modo Energy or Aurora, we’ve got great forecasting tools that can kind of…

I say, know, great, they are, with a pinch of salt at the end of the day, they are pretty much crystal crystal ball, financial models. But, the point is, you know, they’re bankable, and investors are quite happy to take a, take the risk on that. So definitely the perception has changed. Will it change again? Yes, I think it will.

Definitely with the way that’s kind of, you know, ramped with reform and particularly the level of batteries, but also, the level of renewable penetration that we certainly have. And of course, what that does, as battery storage build out gets bigger and bigger, there’s, talk about it a lot, when we say, market saturation, but there will become a point where, battery, battery energy storage revenues will eventually start to cannibalize themselves on what do we do to kind of protect or even hedge against that, so that’s where,

we start looking at things like floor agreements and tolling agreements. It wasn’t us, but certainly Gresham House, that was in the news probably about what, sort of two years ago that the octopus had taken on quite a sizable toll. don’t think the amount was ever published, but it was certainly the first of its kind for battery

Adam Sroka (11:48)
They’ll see you here.

Dan Moore (11:49)
energy storage. they’ve kind of really…

been the pace setters there, guess, kind of in that thing, because now we’re kind of seeing more route to market optimizers that are quite happy to, take a toll on a battery. So certainly from a revenue security point of view, yes, absolutely, know, investors in the future are definitely going to want some kind of guaranteed, revenue because ultimately, that demonstrates that they make a sensible return on their investment as well. that’s certainly why for us as an asset owner potentially,

whilst at Root Power, we’re strictly kind of in the merchant camp at the moment because we still do think that there’s a good enough opportunity there for assets. That’s not gonna last forever, but to couple potentially 100 megawatt battery with a tolling agreement plus a capacity market contract for sort of up to…

depending on your toll, that’s the route you’re go down, anything between seven to 10 years of guaranteed revenue plus your capacity market contracts on top, that’s worth a serious amount of money in the long term. So yes, absolutely, I think the investor kind of landscape is gonna change in that respect.

Adam Sroka (12:52)
I think it’s funny because it’s very easy to talk about innovation, new technology innovation, new hardware, new software, AI, that’s making a big difference. But people do

Dan Moore (13:02)
Peace.

Adam Sroka (13:02)
kind of expect like financial product innovation as well. And it might not seem that innovative to offer a toll. It wasn’t done five years ago, right? And it does materially change the landscape and you get a leader and then followers and slowly but surely the, yeah, the landscape and the entire industry changes. I guess like,

You’re doing all that in pace, in lockstep, with capacity market, right? We’ve had the capacity market reform as being everyone’s favourite topic for probably, let’s say, timeframe, two years or so now. What’s your thoughts on that and what do think the most material impacts are?

Dan Moore (13:38)
Yeah, capacity market is a funny one. mean, we tend to, we all know what it is and it’s kind of seen as a bit of, free revenue and, and I don’t really think, that largely that’s what it’s for. we’ve never had a capacity market event or stroke call in the UK, today, thankfully, because NISO have always been able to kind of source it from other, sort of tools available to them, such as the balancing mechanism. But, certainly, the capacity market really has always been set up for

for gas and sort of those old technologies where they could just ramp up a base load generation or something like that. batteries, there’s been leaps and strides certainly in the capacity market over the years with reforms that have clearly managed to be benefited batteries. Probably the more recent one, particularly for batteries has been when we moved over to scaled equivalent thermo capacity, for example. So.

Two hour batteries, rightly or wrongly, are no longer treated similarly to a four hour asset, which is right. A four hour asset should be able to give more back to the grid than certainly what a two hour can. of course, under the methodologies that they’ve had. So why does that matter? Well, of course, it rewards longer duration batteries properly. It removes gaming from short duration assets and improves the bankability of them from two to four hour sort of systems as well.

stronger positive for that. there were sort of people that were out there very cleverly. I can’t say that we wouldn’t have done the same, but if you had a, an eight hour battery and kind of submitted it as a one hour battery, for example, in the capacity market, you could get away with it without having any sort of degradation sort of applied to it as well. So, but that, course, that has changed now with the reforms. There’s also been better ones with.

course about managing battery degradation, they’ve clarified the rules on being able to augment your battery. again, so asset owners can probably, mitigate that to kind of protect their capacity market contracts. So there’s certainly been lots that’s happened in the capacity market that benefit the battery. Are we there yet? No, I don’t think we are. I think there’s still plenty more that batteries can give particularly to the capacity market. I personally think that derating factors for batteries are particularly high.

I think one of I think even Poland recently kind of applied a similar similar de-rating factor to a battery of around sort of 20 20 percent or whatever it was but a battery will spend most of its life Certainly from a warranty point of view at or around sort of 50 % sort of state of charge So even if you assume that a 50 megawatt battery at two-hour system at 50 % You’ve still got 50 megawatts of potentially one hour to give if you’ve got

a capacity market call with every single thing that’s on the capacity market. I can’t see that, not being able to meet its obligation. So I do think there’s work to be done there. But as to what needs to change, I don’t have the answer for that, unfortunately. That’s probably more clever people than me that do power system modeling and certainly the people at NISO. yeah, there has been some great strides and certainly, increased recognition of the flexibility that the batteries do bring to the table.

Adam Sroka (16:39)
And we’ve seen, like I’ve been in panels and like industry bodies that discussed at length, long duration storage and people for it and pushing for it. Like, how do you think that’s going to impact things like from the perspective of an asset manager?

Dan Moore (16:55)
In terms of long duration storage or just more and

Adam Sroka (16:58)
Yeah.

Dan Moore (16:59)
more. I don’t think it will. the end of the day, a battery is a battery, whether it’s, vanadium flow, lithium ion, compressed air storage. I mean, the technology is different, it’s fundamental level, but, the of the day is still a form of energy storage. I mean, there’ll be particular nuances around

your technology class, and I certainly can’t speak to how, compressed air or liquid storage works, or even, vanadium to some extent. But, the core part of an asset manager’s job, in the day to day is, we have the landlord relationships that we have to manage. there’s operational insurances that still need to be looked at, there’ll still be a meter there, there’ll still be some form of grid connection, and there’s an asset.

core fundamentals as what we do is just to ensure that that asset is maintained over its life and it delivers hopefully against your financial model or exceeds it. We ultimately want the best performance out of it. I don’t think whether or not, as I said, it’s long duration in lithium or long duration in vanadium or anything other really changes the core of what we do. Where I do think long duration will impact

the industry is in the long-term kind of revenue side of things. we’ve obviously heard about the cap and floor scheme and sort of more recently, I think it was even last week, that Ofgem published the results of the first kind of cap and floor scheme. And it was quite, I think, eye-opening, I think is probably the word to say with sort of the level of award that went towards lithium. so that kind of really cements

Adam Sroka (18:29)
you

Dan Moore (18:30)
that.

that lithium still is and continues to be on a pound per kilowatt basis, nothing can compete even close to it. There’s such a huge amount of lithium that one secured a long duration, sort of what I say, license, but certainly pass the eligibility and sort of through the more recently published thing, it was quite eye opening really considering that. And I still think lithium is gonna be around for a very, very, very long time.

Adam Sroka (18:58)
Do you think the policies that are coming in are sufficient? Are they keeping pace to unlock more? Or do you think we need to change the mechanisms?

Dan Moore (19:07)
Yeah, well, I mean, certainly from a long duration point of view, I think it’s a start, definitely. I don’t think what Ofgem set out really is a difficult one to answer, I think, from my point of view. I don’t want to say that it doesn’t work because they needed to do something and they have done something and, the scheme is OK, but this is very much kind of new territory for a lot of people, a few years ago.

Nobody could really define what long duration storage was, right? Some people were saying it was four hours. Some people were saying it was eight. know, some people were saying it was 12 and beyond. wasn’t really a classification of it. And certainly when, Ofgem came out and said that, long duration storage is, it has to deliver eight, at least eight hours of storage over a 25 year life, right? that, that’s it. That’s a long time. particularly for a lithium battery as well,

massive overbuild or, continual augmentation, different strategies for different folks, I guess. Again, to kind of say what would I do to solve it, quite honestly, again, I don’t know. I think really we kind of need to see what the license conditions look like and ultimately how it plays out. There’s a very, very, very small number of long duration storage, which I think they need, but again, my own.

personal maybe contrarian opinion depending on what’s happening right now is I personally don’t think there’s enough storage on the grid right now. I think even Modo published something to the effect a few weeks ago. The UK taxpayer paid, was it one and a half billion for Scottish wind farms to shut down the contracts for difference or some silly, silly number. And We’re only talking about…

11 gigawatts of long duration storage. I think even at the moment with the whole, grid gate two reforms, there’s a There’s an oversubscription of batteries and they’re trying to do something about it right now. there’s an urgent grid reform going through where they’re asking for additional securities and hoping that that’s potentially going to cause some, I don’t know if it will or not, but certainly ask for some batteries to kind of drop out of the queue because of that oversubscription. But if you think that the nation’s demand for energy

in winter is up to sort of 45 gigawatts or something like that at its peak. they’re saying that 50 gigawatts of batteries is too much. So basically what we’re saying is the nation’s demand in winter for maybe one or two hours isn’t enough for storage, particularly when

Adam Sroka (21:29)
Yeah.

Dan Moore (21:30)
the sun isn’t shining and the wind might be blowing. the point is winter is when the system is under its most stress. I think basically is what I’m saying is I think they’ve undercut the numbers.

So that’s my opinion there. I think we need a lot more storage than what they think.

Adam Sroka (21:47)
Yeah. And

also it’s that kind of like, macro assumption that like it probably go up as well. It’s probably going to go up data centers, whatever.

Dan Moore (21:54)
Yeah, exactly that Adam. Yeah, couldn’t agree more. You know, they said more and more data centers coming online, more demand, connection, where we want to transition to a renewable grid, we’re well on our way to doing that. But renewable with renewables comes increased volatility, as we said earlier, The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow,

We have to address that. the only way I say that we can address that is through storage. We just need more of it.

Adam Sroka (22:19)
What about

the increasing complexity of it’s becoming a lot more popular to do like co-location behind the meter? How does that impact it? Does some of that like 30 gigawatt delta actually sneak in behind the meter?

Dan Moore (22:32)
Yes, I think it does. We have actually been looking at that quite extensively ourselves at Root Power, particularly where we’ve got landowners with additional sets of land. We’ve been looking at co-locating the assets with solar or another form of technology. We haven’t really kind of settled on one or the other, but certainly, solar co-location is probably more better, better understood with storage than…

than any other sort of asset class right now. And there’s questions about how do you do that, whether you AC couple and DC couple it, but each one has its pros and cons and depending on sort of your market approach, will determine ultimately which pathway you go down. To your point about behind the meter side of things,

Yes, I think if we’re talking from a demand side response, in fact, I won’t name it, but the Gore Street in particular also have a project which is actually a behind the meter battery, which supports, the landowner there. And even off grid energy, when I was there, that was part and parcel of also what we used to do was, behind the meter battery storage to support, these whether it’s peak shaving and, things like that, it was probably

more importance for particularly large industrial users when triads were still a thing, to kind of cut down their tenuous charges for the following year. It was probably quite attractive then, but since triads have kind of disappeared in favor of other things. But that doesn’t say that one of Elum Energy’s sister businesses is a behind the meter solar business. There’s quite a lot of interest there now for that.

So I think people are becoming more energy conscious about sort of not necessarily their own green footprint, but ultimately trying to just become more resilient, I think, with their energy usage, which is ultimately what the net zero is about in some sense. When people say net zero, most people largely don’t really understand what it means. It’s not a case of we want to be a…

completely renewable grid is just being able to offset what carbon we put in with a renewable footprint in some sense, bit like how renewable obligations certificates were back in the day and carbon credits and so on. That’s really what it’s all about. But yes, to summarize it as we, again, businesses, it’s all well and good saying the grid needs to be green and renewable and all of that. But anything that…

we can do, know, the likes of you and I or any other business can do to make themselves more energy resilient. it’s super, gonna be super, super helpful.

Adam Sroka (25:10)
Yeah, I think it’s like any complicated, like vast problem space that the only way to solve it really is top down and bottom up at the same time. Like you approach it from both ends and try to meet somewhere in the middle that makes sense because the

Dan Moore (25:21)
Exactly.

Adam Sroka (25:22)
reality is what you’ve created.

Dan Moore (25:23)
Yeah, exactly.

Adam Sroka (25:24)
So I think

like we’re entering this new stage in energy, which is quite fun,

multi gigawatt storage.

Dan Moore (25:29)
Thank

Adam Sroka (25:32)
And there’s all these new assets that have been announced and awarded. Any words of warning or things to think about for the asset managers of the future, as they start working with these mega batteries.

Dan Moore (25:45)
Yeah, I mean, I said whether it’s a five megawatt battery or 100 megawatt battery, each asset is going to have its own challenges. just because we’re getting, bigger numbers on paper in terms of quick connections and size of batteries doesn’t mean it’s any more or any less difficult than perhaps some of the smaller, assets that you’re to manage in your day to day portfolio.

My advice would be particularly for your teams, if for any sort of new entries out there, or even existing ones that are developing, similar, well, I say that, but Root Power’s not unique in kind of what we do, but having the full in-house capability to originate, develop, build, own, and operate is certainly quite good for us being vertically integrated, because we can work a lot closer with our supply chain and our own internal teams to kind of really

get the best out of these projects, But yeah, really, really get involved from the early stages. Don’t just leave it for the next person, as it were, to deal with. And what I mean by that is, if you’re able to address a problem, in the early, or foresee a problem in the early stages of development, then do something about it while you can. Don’t just try and…

kick the can down the road as it were and just think, that can be the construction team’s problem or, we’ll deal with that later because before it, you’ll have a problem and then you’ll be scrambling trying to sort it. And it’s probably something that you could have sorted, very, very early on. And I think certainly we’ve come across that unroot power and we’ve been able to address it,

sort of quite early on and kind of come up with, creative and innovative solutions to kind of, solve those problems. And this kind of really, when it comes back to is, again, part of share your experience, we’re, all here to make sure that, net zero and ultimately, battery storage and our company succeed and why wouldn’t we want to work together to make sure that happens. It’s all about a cohesive approach. I mean,

get out there, talk to other asset owners as well, talk about what they’re and hear about what their experiences have been, what problems they’ve had, whether that be from planning or delivery or the markets or even investors, kind of perceptions and things like that. We all need to talk about this in working groups and open forums because whilst we’re all different companies, we’re all building the same asset class, but we are all working towards the same common goal. So we should all share ideas and really just

help

the UK succeed.

Adam Sroka (28:10)
I couldn’t agree more. I think it’s one of the beautiful things about the energy sector is how collaborative it can be. it does bring, yeah, expertise together in a way that we don’t, you don’t see in a lot of other places.

So, to change gear a little bit, I’m just keen to know what are your thoughts on the data, sort of, software technology landscape in the asset management space? I’ve got strong opinions, but I’d love to hear yours.

Dan Moore (28:35)
Yeah, so I’m all for this. I love this kind of stuff. So, apart from all the stuff that we talked about earlier about, relationships, insurances, just ensuring the best out of the asset, all of that stuff is pretty, pretty useless without a substantial set of data supporting all of that, right? and data is a really, really powerful thing, especially if how to use it and manipulate it to your advantage.

hugely,

hugely, fan of it, which will probably lead onto your point next about kind of AI and stuff like that, massive, massive focus area, particularly it has been for, for me, certainly at Root Power and our assets, we’re fully, embracing AI, whether that be from, you know, battery, advanced battery analytics in terms of degradation modeling.

round trip efficiency guarantees, even using that to challenge OEMs on availabilities. AI is a very, very, very powerful tool when it’s used in the correct way. Part of my goals for the Root Power portfolio is we’re gonna have battery analytics, AI on our batteries from day one. The AI landscape isn’t going anywhere.

It’s gonna be around for a very very long time and I think depending on your level of Risk kind of appetite, some people are still AI is still a relatively kind of new thing, know over the past years we see more and more of it in the news every day about the dangers of it and I’m not gonna shy away from the fact that AI, or particular levels of AI isn’t or

I mean, saw ChatGPT Sora not that long ago that was producing all these real videos that were indistinguishable from sort of real world to the next. But that’s a separate topic altogether. certainly for batteries, absolutely. Data and and AI together can be a very, very, powerful combination, which is very, very helpful for us as asset managers.

Adam Sroka (30:30)
That’s quite refreshing. think for me, like my experience

Dan Moore (30:31)
Thank

Adam Sroka (30:34)
of the software, even prior to AI, it’s pretty underwhelming in the space. Like the tools available for asset managers are sometimes kind of adapted or modified from legacy energy systems or other industries. They’re not perfect fit for purpose. like, especially if you’re managing a complex portfolio, you’ll often have like multiple systems with the same

data, but for different assets to log into it, the bit of a painful space. and you wrote the door to AI be a remiss of me to not plug hyper cube. But if you are looking to deploy AI and AI asset management into a portfolio, like that was the very first thing we built with our new Ken platform. We’re super excited to share that with the world and show everyone like what can be done. You’re right. It’s a scary space. Like there is a lot of really worrying attack.

effectively like we’ve introduced this entirely new, totally like misunderstood attack vector into every system that uses AI. I actually banned like OpenCore in HyperCube and completely banned it from anyone in the business using it on a work machine or with working out like this for the simple reason that it’s so wide open and it’s getting better. It’s getting better, but it’s still

far too scary in provisions online where like I’m working with customers and data on their behalf. couldn’t take any risks. And I think if you want to talk about the dangers of AI and the guardrails and actually some of the leverage and the successes that you can have, if you just deploy the experience, like it’s exactly why we exist. I’d love to know like who did the wrangling and the politics and the cat herding to convince

senior manager to let AI loose at root power. And was it like small steps or was there a big on high, we need to be in front of the step change at

Dan Moore (32:34)
Well, I suppose this is part of the benefits of sitting on the senior management team of Root Power, right? And being able to make these decisions. But no, I suppose to kind of answer that question. So part of when I was at Gore Street, they were probably an early adopter of kind of battery AI. we were at the time trialing.

two AI platforms, two very, very well known ones, twice in a cure across the portfolio. And I probably should have said this as well, back, I think battery AI, has come on a long way as well over the years. I mean, if you go back to kind of the early earlier days, and I say the earlier days, we’re probably only talking maybe about what maybe four years ago or so four or five years ago.

which doesn’t really sound that long ago really, but they were positioning themselves as kind of safety analytics for

Adam Sroka (33:30)
Yeah.

Dan Moore (33:30)
really kind of surrounding themselves with battery chemistries, particularly because of, we obviously had the Carnegie Road battery fire, which, and there’s been extensive investigations around that. We’ve also heard about other battery fires.

around the world, thankfully not many in the UK, but that’s largely been attributed to a battery’s chemistry as opposed to kind of anything wrong at kind of a system level. And again, the industry’s adapted and moved on to that because we now, course, pretty much every battery system that you buy these days is LFP chemistry, which is, course, on a sort of chemical level, lot more stable than an NMC one. So of course, again, the battery companies have kind of adapted and

moved on and as I said, it’s become more of an asset management tool now for data management. But anyway, to kind of your point, when I was at Gore Street and helping deliver that, particularly across the projects that we had it on at the time, we could see being involved with the conversations with these AI companies and the roadmaps and everything that they had planned.

I saw a lot of value in that, as did Gore Street at the time. And I basically carried that level of enthusiasm kind of through to Root Power. perhaps some older assets now are bringing these in because they kind of think that it might help them managing the degradation or, as I said, just giving them a deeper level of insight into how their asset is performing. I kind of really wanted that really from day one.

when the asset goes live, I don’t think we should wait sort of three or four years, to kind of understand that our battery isn’t performing as well as it should, from a performance point of view, why wouldn’t you want to have that day one? So it was actually quite a…

quite an easy sell really for me, can kind of express the, and I can talk from experience about the benefits of battery AI and AI in general, that kind of what it brings to the table, particularly for me in asset management and then ultimately us as an asset owner as well. But there’s also the value in if we are diversifying, because we’re not all gonna have our batteries with kind of one technology supply or another, because

there’s just too much supply chain risk in that. And quite honestly, I don’t think there’s probably, going to be a scenario where, any large battery storage IPP has their technology with, with just one, battery provider short, there might be one or two out there, but certainly that that’s not what we plan to do, particularly of our portfolio, which is, I should have plugged earlier is, currently stands at about 860 sort of, megawatts of

battery energy storage that’s all going to be built at four hours as well. So we’re talking about 3.2 gigawatt hours of battery energy storage here. But spread that across multiple technology providers, whether that’s a BYD, a Tesla, a Fluence, or whoever it might be.

to be able to bring that holistically into one platform and see what your entire portfolio is doing at the click of a button. There is huge, huge value in that too. Just having it all centralized in one place or utilizing the same platform, the same algorithm, and just being able to just produce reports from, again, from that, you have a single source of truth and huge, huge value in that.

Adam Sroka (36:52)
I mean, if you’re ever out of a job, there’s a space on my sales team, think. If you

Dan Moore (36:56)
Yeah.

Adam Sroka (36:58)
just come and tell all the other asset owners that, yeah, you need this stuff. But no, it’s a refreshing take because I think like it shows that you’ve had the experience of seeing it pay off because so many people have this like sort of peripheral vision of we should be doing data analytics and AI, but you ask them to define it. They can’t tell you what shape that is or what it means. Whereas when you actually put it into practice and see the output,

when it’s done well, then it becomes apparent and obvious that you just need to do it. And my favorite topic of the asymmetry investment of spending on infrastructure and hardware versus software in these worlds, it’s like, yeah, let’s spend a billion quid and a battery and 50k and a data scientist and call it done. Like it’s, that’s not the way forward in this space when there is so much value locked away in better operations through optimization and forecasting and so on and so forth.

Yeah, refreshing to hear a slightly different approach from someone that’s obviously experienced it first hand.

Dan Moore (37:54)
Yeah, exactly. mean, again, just a bit of a, I suppose, a plug for other asset managers out there that are managing portfolios. I mean, why wouldn’t you want to know that there’s something potentially wrong with your battery or you could squeeze a little bit of extra performance out of it that translates into an extra, I don’t know, 30k a year, maybe more, on that, particularly

things like state of charge drift, you it’s a big conversation point at the moment within the AI space. And if you’ve got somebody that’s almost there being your watchdog and policing that for you, when you, you’re out doing what you should be doing, there’s again, value in that, which again is why I’m such an advocate for it at Root Power. And it’s why we’re doing it from day one.

Adam Sroka (38:30)
One last one then. you got any controversial opinions, hot takes, heard it here first that we can get the scoop on?

Dan Moore (38:37)
Yeah, absolutely.

The UK is not a dying market for energy storage. think, you We hear about that all the time, where people are now looking for different geographies. in short, I know I said touched on earlier, There is going to be a point where the

market

cannibalises itself but there’s still plenty of batteries being built, there’s still plenty of investors that are lending money against it and there is still plenty of money to be made in a merchant market. i think we are going to see that for a lot longer i it It does upset me when people say that the UK is dead as a storage market. We’ve got probably one of the most vibrant storage markets in the world

in terms of the revenue stacks that are available to us as asset owners. And that can only get better, NISO, as I said, will probably do something to address, they are bringing out new revenue streams, or trying to bring out new revenue streams all the time. Black start capability is an example.

whether that’s only available to transmission connected batteries or it’s eventually available to distribution. I don’t know. I haven’t kind of read too much into that at the moment, but the point is, that’s on a pathfinder or was on a pathfinder project. And actually I think it was the Zenobi battery that actually won a, I think it was Black Hillock that actually won one of the first ones. so there’s going to be, there’s plenty of money there. think it’s just some of the, and including myself, we’ve seen, the days of when ancillary services came out and

It was clearing at like 20 plus pound per megawatt per hour. You yeah, okay. it’s nowhere near that these days, but there’s still plenty of, plenty of opportunity for people out there, to make a sensible, FID and return depending on what your, your level of IRR is, but, you can definitely achieve a double digit IRR over a 30 year period, certainly on, what we have available today. So yeah, that’s not me saying by the way that

You you shouldn’t look to diversify into new markets. I’m not saying that. My point is, as I said, there’s still

Adam Sroka (40:30)
Thank you.

Dan Moore (40:31)
plenty of opportunity in the UK for battery storage revenues. and I do think that will be it will be that way for some time. So, we don’t need to, start looking elsewhere just yet. Or if you want to, that’s fine, because it’s more money for Root Power at the end the day and other people as well

Adam Sroka (40:43)
Yeah.

Dan Moore (40:44)
that, are on the same kind of, thought process or building batteries or have batteries already. So.

Adam Sroka (40:52)
need to get around all those landowners but no it’s

Dan Moore (40:53)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Adam Sroka (40:55)
interesting and yeah I think plenty of fun things here to do still like good technical challenges to face as well. I like it.

Dan Moore (41:02)
Yeah, for sure.

Adam Sroka (41:03)
Dan, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It’s been amazing talking to you. Before I let anyone go, I always like to just ask if there’s anything you want to promote or plug or if people in the audience want to find out more about you or Root Power, where should we send them?

Dan Moore (41:18)
Yeah. So if you want to learn more about route powers pipeline, then visit our website, www.root-power.com publishes everything in there about what we’re doing, a little bit about energy storage as well and kind of the benefits that it brings. Also, if you’re a landowner and you potentially live close to a grid connection, again, please do reach out. Our development team are very, very keen to hear from you. We’re always looking for the new opportunities to build batteries. If people want to talk to me and heard a little bit more about me or asked me a question, so I’m available.

via

email. My email is dan.moore@root-power.com. And likewise for any other member of our team, know, everyone, we’re all energy storage nerds really, I think it’s probably fair thing to say. Always

Adam Sroka (42:02)
That’s going.

Dan Moore (42:02)
happy to talk about, batteries and energy storage, to anyone, whether you’re new or already established in the industry, just come talk to us. We are here, more than happy to collaborate to share information where we can.

Adam Sroka (42:14)
Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining us today and I wish you all the best.

Dan Moore (42:17)
Thank you.

Adam Sroka (42:20)
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.