Podcast: What power parks can solve, and why with Mikey Clarke, Relode

00:00:55 – Pete Aston

Hello and welcome to another podcast from Roadnight Taylor. I’m Pete Aston and I’m joined by my colleague, Catherine Cleary, and we’re very excited to welcome Mikey Clark from Relode Energy.

00:01:05 – Mikey Clark

Thank you.

00:01:05 – Pete Aston

Thanks for being with us. So, we’ve got you on, Mikey, to talk about what you’re doing with Relode Energy. Could you give us a little bit of a background as to the sorts of things you’ve already done in the industry, because you’ve done quite a few different things over the years?

00:01:21 – Mikey Clark

I have. It’s been an unusual career, I think, but ultimately, I started in the built environment, building hospitals, schools, data centres. That’s really helpful now, but I’ll get back to that. And then I kind of got the power bug. I moved across into tunnelling when the Olympic tunnels were being built in 2006, 2007. And I became one of the lead engineers on everything that wasn’t the 132kV circuits on behalf of EDF Networks at the time. So, I absolutely fell in love with power. I had a small break, did a lot more data centre work and then went to UK Power Networks to run a program called Low Carbon London. So that was the first round of LCNF projects and really got the bug for kind of future networks, kind of the impact of demand side response, the impact of electrification of transport on heat etc. So really kind of got into network world.

But then decided to have a foray into start-ups and worked for a couple of companies but ultimately met my business partner, Matt Allen, and we started a company called Become Energy. We got our first taste of developing batteries. We put a battery in the Emirates Stadium, which was a phenomenal experience. It was Tesla battery in the middle of London and has performed amazingly well. But then we set up a company called Pivot Power and we kind of pioneered the route for large-scale grid batteries to go onto the transmission system, that was acquired by EDF Renewables at the end of 2019 and I’ve really been working on the grid side and head of grid for EDF Renewables until about a year and a half ago when some kind of industry friends and I that I’ve worked with before came together and formed Relode Energy, which is our new venture.

00:03:10 – Pete Aston

That’s quite a varied career path. I didn’t actually know any of that until just now, so that’s really exciting. Well, I knew the Pivot Power bit, yeah, but I expect a lot of a lot of listeners will be familiar with, with pivot power and obviously, EDF Renewables as well, so then, what’s talk us through Relode Energy, what are you trying to achieve? What’s the background to your idea for that?

00:03:34 – Mikey Clark

Okay. So Relode is a, I kind of describe it as a special purpose company. So, we’re a special purpose company that’s looking specifically at the large-scale demand of the future. So, this might be the transport vector where we’ve got land, air and marine. They’re all ultimately, we think, are going to move to an electric derived fuel or direct electricity with batteries, particularly with the HGV – they’re probably leading the way, they’re starting to appear in the UK; so, we really want to support that sector.

We’ve also got other things like data centres, which are becoming huge and kind of close to my heart. But with the influence of AI and these, these new NVIDIA Cards, the density is kind of an order of magnitude more than when I was building them in the in the mid-naughties and they’re getting bigger. I heard the other day of a megawatt rack which is blowing my mind. So, the energy density is just getting huge. There are also things like the marine industry where actually the air quality is being impacted by ships just sitting at port running generators on diesel and you’ve got all the impacts on that and air quality. Large electricity connections can solve that with cold ironing, particularly with cruise ships; they might be 10 megs for a cruise ship.

00:04:55 – Pete Aston

And cold ironing.

00:04:57 – Mikey Clark

Sorry yeah, I’m getting into the lingo, so cold ironing is when you turn off a ship’s generator but plug in a multi-megawatt plug.

00:05:07 – Pete Aston

Okay, so the ship isn’t running systems.

00:05:09 – Catherine Cleary

So, all of the ships systems run off that?

00:05:10 – Mikey Clark

Exactly that, so they’re called house power, house supplies, but it means all the air conditioning, particularly on things like cruise ships. They have six megawatts of air conditioning, and so the amount of fuel they burn through just means that plugging them into a good quality shore supply means you solve that problem inshore. There’s a lot more to do once they’re out in the international waters, but that’s probably a decade away. But there’s a lot of real things that can be solved right now with properly designed load connections in the right place.

00:05:48 – Pete Aston

Okay, so I guess most demand connections across the grid to date have been distribution network connections. Distribution network connections are typically up to sort of 50, 100 megawatts. That’s typical maximum, few, a bit more steelworks, whatever. But I know from our conversation just now that you’re talking significantly bigger than that in terms of what you’re looking at. So, can you just sort of sketch out the type of solution that you’re looking at to resolve some of these sort of multi vector transport solutions? And you know other big date centre type solutions?

00:06:26 – Mikey Clark

Yeah, absolutely. So, we’ve come up with a concept of power parks, so these are a they’re like a campus idea where we bring a very large connection, probably hundreds of megawatts, into extra high voltage, modular, flexible kind of current technology substation and then we can have multiple off-takers from there. So, we become effectively a start point for our own network and our own customers. So, it hopefully takes stress off the transmission owner. It hopefully helps NESO out by having a competent owner of HGV kit.

We’re also going to be then designing our own HGV lorry parks, and when I say HGV, I mean kind of the 40 to 44 tonne articulated lorries that are the backbone of logistics in the UK and coaches and other things like that. They can be dedicated spaces for certain companies, they can be for passing traffic and most of it will be contracted, and so the beauty of logistics is they tend to know what they’re doing a little bit ahead of time so we can start looking at capacity and building to the right size. But ultimately this power park arrangement means that we can then not only supply our own electric HGV developments but we can also run a cable 10 kilometres down the road to a port to help them with a multi-megawatt or tens of megawatts for their ferry charging, cold ironing, manufacturing of marine fuels, ultimately one day. So, we think it’s a really versatile solution – hasn’t really been done before.

00:08:11 – Catherine Cleary

Yeah, that power park idea, because we talked a little bit about grid parks, for example, and I think we had a really useful conversation earlier to clarify what a power park was versus what a grid park was.

So some listeners are probably familiar with the concept that’s been kind of proposed in a couple of areas for generation schemes, for example, where multiple generators or maybe a storage or battery user come along and say we’d like to connect and they’re in a roughly similar location and so a National Grid would you know, potentially build out a what they’d call a grid park, which would be, you know, building out to 33kV or 132kV and having a kind of common bus bar to allow those customers to connect and they’re sharing those connection assets.

But the power park…

00:08:53 – Pete Aston

And sorry, often single transformer?

00:08:56 – Catherine Cleary

Single , yes, single transformer, so quite a kind of cheap and cheerful solution, I suppose you know, to get down 33kV for maybe some you know maybe 350 megawatt customers or something like that, but who were generation customers or storage customers who were happy with that kind of non-firm supply, whereas your power parks, you know they’re quite fundamentally different in a couple of ways because actually you are the single customer to NESO and you’re offering that connection out to your multiple you know sort of different energy vector and energy users and you’re offering a firm connection?

00:08:29 – Mikey Clark

Yes, absolutely. I think firm for most of our customers is going to be very critical. I’ve spent a lot of my career, recent career looking at tertiaries and grid parks. Grid parks kind of with the evolution of tertiaries, not having enough tertiaries that were viable, and so grid parks were kind of born out of that. A power park for us is a concept where we can really serve all our customers, but being firm when you’re talking about critical logistics, manufacturing of fuel, where you don’t want to be switched off for days, weeks at the time because of an outage, and definitely data centres need the firmest of firm connections for uptime whether that bears out and is so important for these kind of AI compute data centres but I suspect the prevailing kind of requirement will be a genuine firm connection.

00:10:28 – Pete Aston

So, I guess, if you’re up to hundreds of megawatts, you’re talking at least two Super Grid Transformers, maybe three, four, depending on exactly how big. So, in terms of scale, can you give us an indication of how big you might go with some of these things? I guess it depends on exactly the scenario that you’re…

00:10:51 – Mikey Clark

Absolutely so as we go around the country we look at the type of customers that are likely to be off takers from us. So, where there’s a high density of, let’s say, electric heavy goods vehicles aligned with a port near an AI growth zone, then we’re talking about close to a gigawatt worth of connections. That will be multiple super grid transformers, still in the transmission domain, but we will take that down to 132kV panels. That again are the most current and flexible.

00:11:25 – Pete Aston

And you’ll essentially be running then a private network feeding out to multiple customers.

00:11:29 – Mikey Clark

Yeah, the concept of private wire isn’t new to us we’ve done it before elsewhere in the country and so we think it’s a materially kind of progressive step that we can do for customers and hopefully solve some of the stress on the connections queue, because a lot of these customers that we’re talking to now haven’t thought about making an application for 50 megs. They haven’t thought about the fact that the queue will probably spit out a 2040 date for them. We’re hoping that by aggregating multiple new types of electricity customer we can really take the pressure out of connection queues, the networks and also the kind of business requirements of our customers.

00:12:14 – Pete Aston

So, it seems like you’re going to sit in the middle between sort of NESO and the transmission owners and a number of different customers. So, when we were talking earlier, I could sort of get an idea how you could actually be of benefit both to NESO and the transmission areas and be a benefit to those end customers. Can you sort of just talk us through how you think you can sort of be beneficial both directions?

00:12:45 – Mikey Clark

Yeah, absolutely. towards

00:12:46 – Pete Aston

Towards the NESO and then towards the customers.

00:12:49 – Mikey Clark

No, well, we think this is a major part of the offer. So, by connecting us and us being a competent developer and operator, we can kind of connect us and potentially get five large multi-megawatt, multi-tens of megawatt customers coming on. And actually, conversely, we’ve got customers that are very good at buying diesel, very good at kind of running diesel ships etc. But don’t know what a 28-week submission is, don’t know what the CUSC is or Grid Code or the obligations that they would have if they applied themselves. So, we think we can be the ultimate middleman where we actually sit in the middle and look both ways and provide a service. But there’s also benefits like hopefully speeding up these connections for these new types of customers. And ultimately these customers, I say this everywhere and whoever I speak to, these customers will pay for the entire electricity network of the future.

So, the priority and the position they get in queues should not be kind of just put sequentially with other renewable generators. These are absolutely critical assets, not just for kind of GDP growth of the UK but also the entire electricity system. So, we think it’s a super critical kind of phase and we think Connections Reform is hugely positive. We’ll test that in the next six months as to whether what kind of I believe comes to the fore, but we really hope it does. We’ve had great engagement from various government departments, and we just hope NESO and Ofgem can kind of see the benefit of this type of arrangements and companies like us.

00:14:34 – Catherine Cleary

Yeah, I guess at least you know it’s good that we’ve got a starting point of saying what we, you know they absolutely believe that all demand is needed. You know it’s not going to be a kind of a shutting up shop for demand. You know we do need to facilitate the electrification, and the network is there to ultimately serve demand.

00:14:48 – Mikey Clark

Yeah, well, I hope we’ve influenced that a little bit. Hopefully that’s sentiment they truly believe in. I think it’s a case of designing rules and designing a connections system and queue that’s more transparent and really is built for the customers that will ultimately pay the bills.

00:15:08 – Pete Aston

And I guess from NESO point of view, having one applicant yourselves who are then serving sort of multiple customers is beneficial to them rather than having, you know, three, four, five different applications for much smaller capacities that might not fit on the DNO network but, you know, maybe are still quite small on a transmission network. So, I can see how that could be beneficial to…

00:15:33 – Mikey Clark

We hope so we hope so, and demand is a fairly new game for both parties at this level. I mean we’ve got some very historic large industries chemical works and steel, etc. But actually this is fairly new territory. So we hope, by aggregating and bringing them together and taking a lot of the administration away from NESO, but still being the experts in the middle that make sure they get the right data, make sure they get the right technical information and kind of compliance and commissioning is what we do, so we’re hoping it’s beneficial in both directions.

00:16:07 – Catherine Cleary

It does seem like there is quite a big benefit potentially in terms of the sort of even just the physical location of a substation. You know you are kind of helping perhaps take some of that risk away from NESO sort of you know strategic planning in terms of you know, rather than having to second guess, right, well, there’s a port here, maybe they’ll want to electrify. You know, actually, you’re doing quite a lot of that homework in advance and saying, well, we think well you know, here’s a good spot and there’s very little risk of any kind of stranded or underutilised asset, because actually you know we’ve got multiple users behind us who want to take that energy off.

00:16:45 – Mikey Clark

We think so. We’ve spent a lot of time, a lot of shoe leather, going around and talking to customers and seeing what they need and what they want, and we think we’ve done the homework, and we know a little bit about the grid. So, yeah, we hope we found a solution that does benefit all.

00:17:01 – Catherine Cleary

What’s the, oh sorry…

00:17:02 – Pete Aston

No, carry on Catherine.

00:17:03 – Catherine Cleary

I was just intrigued. Do you think there are, so you’re not proposing to be an IDNO. I suppose we should like. That’s probably worth pulling out. The private network is a different commercial model to going out and getting a licence to be an independent distribution network operator. Are the customers, you know what’s the difference and what you know, is there a benefit for customers coming onto a private network compared to coming onto a licensed IDNO network, do you think?

00:17:29 – Mikey Clark

So, fundamentally it should not feel any different from going onto an independent network, a licensed network, or us. It should look and feel the same, the cost should be fairly similar, and the quality of the supply should be probably as good as it gets. When it comes to, we’re taking off transmission, we’re maintaining our kind of redundancy in all our equipment and our supply contracts and if they need M plus 2, then we can. We can arrange M+2. If they need M+1, we can do that also. One of the other benefits is if they only need 30 megawatts on day one but they think they’ll go to 100 megawatts, we can also accommodate that in a contract where they’re not paying for it all up front like they do with the network. So, we think by aggregating there’s some additional benefits that customers will see when they can have ramps that suit them. I mean, even a data centre takes five years typically to ramp up to fill those rack spaces and really start drawing down that power. Let’s see if that happens, when there are megawatt racks – we’ll see if that happens.

00:17:32 – Pete Aston

Can you give us a sense of scale in terms of the ports, because I think a lot of us have got an idea of data centres are big and they’re getting bigger, you know, up to sort of hundreds of megawatts or gigawatt-type scale connections for data centres.

I think we’ve got a sense of what electric vehicles for lorries and stuff is like, you know, that’s big. I guess if you’ve got lorry parks you’re talking into many tens or hundreds of megawatts for that. But in terms of ports, can you give us a sense of scale, what the current port might be in terms of capacity and what that might look like for future electrical demand on a port?

00:19:14 – Mikey Clark

Yeah, absolutely. So, current ports have a real spectrum and really depends what they do. They’re typically single digit megawatts and we’ve got some really extreme examples. So, the port I heard talking the other day was Dover and they’re obviously very heavy in car and road ferry traffic and they obviously Dover and also principally their tenants have got an ambition to be electric for cross-channel ferries in the next decade. At the moment Dover has four megawatts of supply – they need 160. Each ferry is going to take 30, or 30 plus megawatts per ferry and that’s going to be on a on an hour turnaround. So, the amount of power, kind of delta you’ll see is a genuine order of magnitude. Even when you’re talking about Southampton, that’s got cruise ships in, and it can have two or three cruise ships at a time. Each one of those cruise ships can be 12 megawatts, 16 megawatts in some extreme cases of air conditioning and house load.

That’s just to keep the ship running while they’re unloading and loading,

00:20:29 – Pete Aston

And that’s powering the ship?

00:20:30 – Mikey Clark

Not even, not even traction or propulsion.

00:20:33 – Catherine Cleary

we’re doing a good job of making people feel suitably guilty about the holidays they’re about to go on.

00:20:38 – Mikey Clark

Yeah, we’ll talk about cruise ships another time, but the moment, what we can do is provide solutions to start improving air quality in ports and kind of improving the green credentials of these things. The same with cargo ships and container ships they all sit there and chug away at plus one megawatts of ultimately diesel often in an urban environment, and so the air quality issue alone should be enough, and the ports are realising this.

00:21:10 – Catherine Cleary

Noise, I guess, is another benefit.

00:21:11 – Mikey Clark

Noise, there tend to be pretty noisy places, but certainly on board, having a main engine or a diesel generator not running, the difference is phenomenal. When you turn that off, it’s kind of eerie, almost.

00:21:24 – Pete Aston

Yeah so, so I guess for a port, from what you’re saying, that the order of magnitude is at least 10 times,

00:21:33 – Mikey Clarke

Yes, maybe more if they’re a multi-mode port that kind of has containers, has either road ferries, cargo ferries, plus they have other vectors. Like they’ve got manufacturing on site, they might have fabrication on site. The power consumption could be tens of megawatts when they’ve currently only got three or four.

00:21:57 – Catherine Cleary

And they’re all located on the coast, which is a bit of a challenge, isn’t it? Because the transmission network largely does not go right to the coast. You know that from having to connect offshore wind and go quite a long way on shore, so there is a locality challenge.

00:22:12 – Mikey Clark

Yeah, and I think some of them are really nicely placed and, like you say, some of them are 10, 20 kilometres away from the nearest transmission node and I promise you that transmission node’s probably quite full or land limited. So, we’ll need solutions, and we’ll need to work with government and NESO et cetera to support those. But there’s plenty out there that we can get connected sooner.

00:22:40 – Pete Aston

Talking about connection nodes. So within the sort of big grid queue that we’ve had for a couple of years, NGET has certainly been proposing loads of new connection node substations all around the country, I guess some of those will disappear through Connections Reform where a lot of batteries have been kicked out the queue. But is that sort of connection node location something that you’re finding very challenging to find the most suitable connection location given the power requirements you’re after? Or is that a conversation that’s happening with NGET and NESO?

00:23:19 – Mikey Clark

So, NGET, a lot of our connections sit within the England Wales network. We are also working in Scotland. We still find them quite approachable, but there’s definitely a gap opened up with NESO, and NESO is where we really seek a bit more comfort than we’re getting. So there’s a lot of things we can take into our own control making sure we know who else is around, because ultimately if there’s more than one of us there’s more chance that we can have some sort of influence on where new connection nodes, new substations are built. And it’s in NESO’s interests to make sure the energy density of these new nodes are economically good for the customer base that’s paying for them at the moment.

00:24:10 – Pete Aston

Just going back to the customers, I can see that the benefit to someone like a port customer who’s maybe got one electrical engineer in the company who maybe runs the 11kV network around the site, but that’s quite a big step change from running a 5MW 11kV network up to having to apply for 100MW or more of demand. You know, what does that look like? So, I guess that’s some of the added value you provide to those customers.

00:22:42 – Mikey Clark

Now there’s certainly, I mean ports are probably furthest ahead in having on-site engineers, on-site SAPs etc. For their local networks, they often have an 11kV ring, maybe a 33 kV ring in certain places but when you move to other vectors, if you go to the road transport and electric heavy goods vehicles that are coming in the future they’re incredibly slick operators when it comes to their diesel fleet. So, they are the most expert at buying diesel and hedging diesel ahead of time – they’re amazing at route planning. What they haven’t done before is applied for a large-scale electricity connection. They haven’t come across to CUSA or Grid Code or CUSC, and so by us sitting in the middle, we can start looking both ways and we can start looking at our customers and helping them with their needs and their growth, importantly. But we can also look up to NESO, and to the codes, and to the network owners to make sure we’re in compliance and we’re helping our customers get into this new space that they find themselves in.

00:25:53 – Catherine Cleary

In terms of, I guess, particularly looking at that private networks issue, are there any kind of challenges to overcome there in terms of, I don’t know, custom metering or you know the particular things that you’re sort of trying to influence, perhaps barriers to overcome?

00:26:08 – Mikey Clark

So I think one of the key things is to make sure that, as we bring each technology or new customer onto our network, that we’ve got the right commissioning strategy and the right compliance plan, to make sure that we’re not trying to kind of get engineers from NESO every time a new customer’s on to do a whole new commissioning and compliance plan.

00:26:28 – Catherine Cleary

Because it’s a major undertaking.

00:26:30 – Mikey Clark

It’s huge undertaking, yeah, I’ve spent a lot of my, a lot of years doing it, so I know the stresses of it and I, but we also have that insight now to know how to approach it. Metering, the first time we did this in another guys, metering was a headache. But actually, once you understand how Alexa works, how your route to market process works, and how metering aggregation works.

00:26:57 – Catherine Cleary

You’ve kind of cracked that nut… across

00:26:58- Mikey Clark

Across four quadrants.

I think the hard yards we did are really going to pay off. So as far as our customers are concerned, the only slight difference between a distribution connection at hundreds or low megawatts will be they move out of the SVA domain and into CVA and there’s probably a bit of a learning curve in the supply industry. But that’s part of what we’re doing is making sure there’s a raft of suppliers that can handle a CVA meter. But I think that’s probably the hard yards were worth it, I think is the key thing.

00:27:36- Pete Aston

If there’s any listeners wondering what SVA and CVA mean, CVA is central volume aggregation and SVA supplier volume aggregation.

00:27:43 – Mikey Clark

CVA is customer volume allocations, is that right? Effectively means, you’re settled, and your imbalance is based on your unique half hourly half hour consumption as measured. SVA means you’re in the supplier’s volume allocation.

 

00:27:59 – Pete Aston

Which is what most customers are within that SVA.

00:28:04 – Mikey Clark

So yeah, well, most customers are, but I’ve only ever worked in the CVA, so I’ve always worked connecting into transmission so it’s fairly kind of it’s a daily thing, so it’s doable.

00:28:16 – Pete Aston

There’s a bit of a learning curve for suppliers, so I think we’ve got really good ideas as to what you’re trying to do with Relode Energy, which is really exciting. Can you just sort of, as we’re sort of winding up, talk us through any particular struggles you’ve got at the moment, any particular issues that you’re trying to work through at present?

00:28:37 – Mikey Clark

So, I think everything we’re doing at the moment is still BAU, so it’s still business as usual for us. We still have to make sure we have got all our land agreements kind of in the right place with the right terms, making sure we’re hitting the July deadlines and Mod Apping appropriately. So that’s stressful, but it’s not nothing we’re not used to and…

00:29:00 – Catherine Cleary

Ready for Connections Reform.

00:29:02 – Mikey Clark

Getting ready for Connections Reform, but we think Connection Reform is a gift to the industry. We really do and I’m glad Ofgem and NESO have been bold enough to do it and to kind of put enough weight behind it to make it real. So, we think that’s stressful but that’s a timing thing and we’re on top of that. I think the key for us is to ensure we get enough transparency for the next six months, because once we put sites into the reform acceleration process, there’s a big black hole where companies like us we’re always raising money, we’re always making sure we’ve got finance and systems and everything ready for the first build and we don’t know if our first build is going to be in 2028 or 2035, and that is the biggest headache.

So, I think any insight we can get and any dialogue we have with Ofgem and with NESO and the government are going to be absolutely critical and I understand there’s going to be a limited amount, but actually if you’ve got a portfolio like us that’s nearly four gigawatts.

Actually, we don’t want them all landing in one year, but we also want to have that conversation to say actually we’d love to a year and it will take the stress off of NESO and the Scottish TOs and National Grid will also give us a deliverable portfolio, because there’s a little bit of uncertainty at the moment. We’re putting in our best efforts as to where we want things to land and we know that different parts of the country will have different outcomes just due to CP30, due to where they’re actually building. What from offshores coming on and dictating things. So for us, it’s really staying on top of that dialogue, making sure we’re working with industry partners like yourselves to understand that, because at the moment there’s seven of us in my team and we’ve been around the industry for a long time, but our day job is developing, it’s not exclusively grid. So, it’s really a case of making sure we’re getting the right support where we need it but ultimately pressing on and being a quality developer.

00:31:19 – Catherine Cleary

Keeping those lines of communication open where you can. Are you struggling with that? Obviously, as we record, NESO, only a couple of weeks ago, has basically sort of drawn up that drawbridge to say, look, actually we probably can’t talk on project specifics or portfolio specifics and kind of pushed queries into the public domain or the portal. Is that something you’ve seen too?

00:31:40 – Mikey Clark

Definitely. Radio silence is a challenge for me. I’m a social animal. We get a lot done in our industry by talking and so by pulling up the drawbridge and going through a portal, I understand why there’s so much going on at the moment and if there’s a firewall between developers and them so they can have, so NESO, in particular, can have considered answers and consistent answers, we broadly support it. But equally, it’s so nice to pick up the phone and just say, ask a quick question, get it resolved, done, rather than put it into a portal, wait a few days and then maybe not get the answer that actually answers your question, and going back again and it just when you’re under time pressure, like we are to hit July acceleration windows. Yeah, I miss it. I miss it. We got, we’ve always got a lot done in my career, by having dialogue, but we understand.

00:32:36 – Catherine Cleary

And hopefully we’ll go back to that.

You know, that’s the idea.

00:32:39 – Mikey Clark

We hope so, I think if NESO predictions are true and we get 80 of customers falling out the queue, then it should be back to how it was in 2018, when I started my career in kind of putting batteries on transmission. So, yeah, yeah, we hope so.

00:33:03 – Pete Aston

And I guess there’s a few other positive things coming forward for demand connections as well, to, not least, the change in the securities arrangements of moving away from final sums, where you’re securing all the works, to sort of generation-style securities where you’re only securing a proportion of what happens is. Is that sort of going to be a positive impact for you, if it does transpire?

00:33:28 – Mikey Clark

It will be hugely positive. I was hoping it would be ready for kind of the end of the year. We’re not relying on it – that’s the key thing. I think the most important thing for the network operators and NESO to understand is that the cost of securities for us as a small company is so outsized in terms of the work that we have to do to run our company. If we have to buy an insurance product or go and get a bank to back it off, the cost is huge and it’s kind of it takes a lot of time and a lot of energy to go and maintain those things and then to repeat them every six months. So, we really hope changes come to final sums, but we can’t rely on it as a business not yet.

00:34:21 – Pete Aston

Okay, but potentially a positive.

00:34:23 – Mikey Clark

Hugely positive yeah, we’re huge supporters of it.

We welcomed CMP192 when it came into the generation space and we think, for a parity point of view, as demand customers are going to become more prevalent. We think it, we think it makes sense, even if the numbers are not quite the same, to become more prevalent. We think it. We think it makes sense, even if the numbers are not quite the same. I think any support in that area is great, especially when customers like us we are, we strive to use standard equipment. We make sure that there won’t be stranded assets as best we can. So, we hope, we hope those things come in.

00:34:28 – Pete Aston

Yeah, I think we’re nearing the end of our time. Is there anything else you’d like to raise, Mikey, in terms of Relode energy or industry in general? Maybe that’s a dangerous question.

00:35:10 – Catherine Cleary

Yeah, we can have the next one. Where might we see the first power park, do you think?

00:35:15 – Mikey Clark

Well, I think that’s entirely up to NESO. So, we’re raising money for all our Devex to get us out to uh first project build. I would dearly hope we’ve spades in the ground within a few years and building what should be the biggest and best electric HGV charging parks in the world, alongside our power park substations that will allow customers to connect as soon as they want, which will game change the market, we think.

00:35:49 – Pete Aston

It’s fantastic, it’s very exciting.

00:35:51 – Mikey Clark

Thank you.

00:35:52 – Pete Aston

Mikey, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Catherine, thank you everyone for listening and or watching. It depends on what you’re doing, but we hope that you’ll join us for another podcast soon.

00:36:02 – Catherine Cleary

Thanks, and goodbye, thanks.

00:36:05 – Mikey Clark

Awesome… Thank you ever so much.