Power of Data, Data of Power - Ep 140: Quentin Draper Scrimshire

Transcript

Michael Liebreich

Hello, I'm Michael Liebreich and this is Cleaning Up. My guest this week is Quentin Draper-Scrimshire, CEO of Modo Energy. Modo are a leading provider of data analytics and market insights into battery energy storage, and other energy assets. And for the record, I am a modest angel investor in Modo Energy. Please welcome Quinton Draper-Scrimshire to Cleaning Up.

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Cleaning Up is brought to you by our lead supporter, Capricorn Investment Group, the Liebreich Foundation and the Gilardini Foundation.

Quentin, thank you so much for joining us here today on Cleaning Up!

Quentin Draper Scrimshire

Thanks for having me, Michael.

So in my introduction, I've explained that there's a company called Modo which you founded and run, and that I'm an investor, I'm an angel investor. And actually my investment is very modest, but it means a lot to me. But assume that the audience don't know anything above that. So who are you? And what does Modo do?

Well, I'm Quentin Scrimshire, or you can call me Q, and I'm CEO and co-founder of Modo Energy. And we're a data analytics company that specialises in how grid-scale batteries or renewable assets make money.

Okay, and this information you sell, I'm assuming that, perhaps a little bit like New Energy Finance back in the day when I founded it, you're signing up asset owners, or perhaps so perhaps investors, perhaps power market participants for this sort of information?

Yeah, so the business model is a little bit like a Bloomberg terminal. So we scrape and pull data from lots of different places. And we have our own indices and benchmarks that sit on top of that. And we sell that to primarily asset owners and utilities, funds, institutional investors in the UK and the US. And in the battery world, the grid scale battery world in the UK, we serve about three quarters of the market there. And some of our customers are oil majors and some of the biggest banks in the world.

Okay, and you're not doing sort of generic market analysis or long term economics, you're not so much helping with strategy, as "should you today sell electricity or buy electricity", because of course, a battery is kind of weird, it can do either.

So we do both. So we do, we benchmark how assets performed in the past, we help folks figure out what's happening right now with real time data feeds. And we also have 20 year forecasts going out into the future of the power market. So if you're valuing one of these assets on your balance sheet, you know, the revenues to put into your DCF if you like.

DCF, discounted cash flow. So that's the long term decision making. You're also informing that which is perhaps straying a bit more into, you know, into, you know, New Energy Finance, Bloomberg,New Energy Finance territory, but, but you're building it very much on this kind of- the trading decisions that people are having to make. And can you can you perhaps, kind of explain a bit about the power markets, I mean our audience, they're all very smart, but they don't necessarily trade power all day, in fact most of them don't. And they're civic society, regulators, politicians, you know, all sorts. So tell us how the power markets kind of work, what sorts of things you're buying and selling.

Absolutely. So I'm a bit of a battery nerd. I've been doing grid-scale battery stuff since 2014, 2015, which is actually a long time in this new market. And so, batteries as an asset class are very unusual. So if we just think about a wind turbine or solar panel to start with, when these assets generate power, they either take the market rate or they have a long term contract with a government or some sort of subsidy where they get- they know what they're gonna get. And when the sun shines or the wind blows, as long as your asset is available, you get paid. Batteries are different, right? So you can have battery A and battery B, identical batteries connected to the grid in the same place, and they're both- let's say you spend 50 million pounds on each. So these are big, big investments. And you build a phenomenal battery that's really high quality and high availability, does all the stuff it's supposed to do. And then when you operate it, you have to choose when to discharge it and when to charge it, when to buy power and when to sell power. And the decisions you make on a five minute or half-an-hour basis around how you do that, and how you operate these assets, that's the difference between making a lot of money and losing a lot of money. So it's, it's this new type of asset class where there's an outsized proportion of your income is based on the decisions you make around it, not just keeping the blades turning, if you like.

And those sorts of decisions, it could be, well, it's sunny during the day, so we'll charge the battery, and then we'll sell electricity in the evening. Right, that's one decision. But there are some others, you could sit there waiting with your battery fully charged, waiting for somebody else to have a problem and fall off the grid, some other generator and then say, haha, now I'm ready. And I'm going to sell into that part of the market. So there's all these different markets? And can you kind of take us through a few of them?

Yeah, I mean, this is a podcast episode in itself. But different regions around the world have got different grid operators and markets. And if we just think about the UK as a base here, you've got markets that range from trading power in seasons ahead, so big liquid markets are seasons ahead, all the way- and then month ahead, some products that are week ahead, some different services, like frequency response that help keep the lights on and keep national grids' control room happy, all the way up to day ahead, intra-day, which is the same day, of course, and then real time -stuff's happening in real time. And on top of that, there's other market layers like something called the "balancing mechanism", or nodal-pricing, or regional-pricing - there's all these different parameters, which affect what you should do at what time. And I guess there's another important thing to say here, which is that grid-scale lithium ion batteries connected to the grid, they're just like the batteries that you have in a cell phone or in a laptop. And so they're limited. So in its lifetime, maybe in 10 years, you can only do 10,000 cycles. So you can charge and discharge it from 0 to 100, back to 0 again, once or twice a day, which means you've got- you've got a bullet in the chamber - if you like - in the power markets, to choose, 'I want to buy or sell or discharge or charge.' And you have to choose very carefully, because if you overload the battery, then it will get too hot, and you'll degrade it too fast, or you'll go outside your warranty conditions or loads of other things can happen. So it's a very thin line you have to tread between operational risk, market risk, asset risk, or in lots of different markets at once. So it's a data problem. It's an optimization problem. And we help companies that own assets or operate assets or invest in assets, figure out what they should do with that.

Right. And this takes me back to when you and I first met, which was quite soon after you started, I think it was it was right in the first sort of round of external fundraising. And I remember around then, I think Google's machine learning team had their- I can't remember exactly which platform it was, but they'd beaten the world's best Go player. That had just happened. And I figured, 'hang on a second, so Go, very complicated game, lots and lots of different things going on, lots of different potential strategies, lots of rules, vast optimization space, and machine learning beats human.' And I just thought, 'batteries, exactly the same problem, machine learning will beat human, and this guy looks smart, and that seems to be roughly what he's trying to do.' But that was back then. How much of that vision did I capture correctly, and how much of it has survived, you know, five years, or whatever it is now, six, seven years of building a business?

Well, so it's funny you say that. There's still a bit of an argument going on. So in my mind, it's pretty clear. This is a, this is a data and forecasting problem. You know what to do now if you know what the future looks like. All of this is massive amounts of data, and it's a computer problem in simple terms. But there's still a bit of a battle going on between the old guard of physical traders, human traders who trade power through these assets, and the computer systems and startups that are starting to build forecasting, optimization algorithms. And no one's really won yet. I think it's fair to say that the technology providers who are trading power to these assets are not completely automatic yet, so you still need a human to- human trader to look over it. And then the standard trading desk, so at your typical trading companies, are using lots of machine learning forecasts to see what's going to happen yet- next, but it;s the human that makes the decision. So the world hasn't decided which is going to win yet. To me, it seems absolutely obvious. But that's just me.

Yeah. So, I mean, where we you're coming from was things like, you could, you're building a battery, that $50 million asset, and you say, well, some proportion of it, we want to kind of always have available to do something for somebody out there. So we'll sell, you know, 1/3 of the capacity, and then 1/3 we'll use in the balancing market and 1/3 we'll use in the spot market. So you might do some long term, medium term- and it was 1/3, 1/3, 1/3. And that was a human deciding that, and I just looked at it and said, 'Well, why would it be- why would the right answer be 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 rather than, you know, this year based on the long term weather forecast, 47.235% versus- and surely only a computer can really do that optimization?

I 100% agree.

So all these sort of humans during doing heuristics, they're still in the game, they're still in the game, but you don't think they're going to win?

Well, I think there's lots of square peg, round hole issues here, right? So batteries, grid-scale batteries, to put this into perspective, the UK has got roughly three gigawatts of batteries online right now. So that is about a couple of billion pounds of CapEx and about the size of a large nuclear power station. So there's lots of these things around the place. If you're listening to this, and you haven't seen one, go Google one, they are phenomenal to look at. But I'm biassed, and the amount of batteries connected to the grid is going to double or triple in the next few years in the UK. Elsewhere in the world, it's going even faster. Where am I- where I am right now in Texas, we're at two gigawatts right now and eight next year, so 4x in a year. So that puts it into perspective, there's lots of capital flowing into these assets. Now, what's really unusual about battery assets is, the whole generation system, so the whole power market, in all of these different regions is designed around there being big generators, like coal power stations, or gas power stations, and then demand, so big factories or houses. And all of the regulation and market design is around whether you're- are you a generator, or are you demand, okay? The issue with a battery is it's both, right, so you can't regulate it like a generator, and you can't regulate it like demand: it actually does both perfectly. And because batteries can respond so quickly- so a normal power station might take you from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours to start up, a battery is online in half a second, full power. Bam. And that kind of flexibility and instantaneousness of it is really hard to match and regulate. So you've got power markets and market structures, which are designed around old fashioned equipment, and then you've got this new disruptive rocket ship of an asset that can do everything. It can look like a generator, it can look like demand. It can come online from 0 to 100%, in half a second. It can provide frequency response, it can support the grid, it can provide backup power, it can pretty much do everything. And that is very difficult to fit into these markets that are designed around the old world. So it's a big change happening in power markets everywhere. But power markets are quite slow to change.

Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus, who was my guest on one of the early episodes some time ago - and actually I must try and get him back - he describes it as the power markets are essentially structured around buying and selling rectangles of power. So-much power for half an hour or for a month or for whatever and that they're all very comfortable buying and selling rectangles. The problem is that both the variable renewables and of course even also, batteries, are just what they're doing is actually producing spikes, spikes up very cheaply, but then also spikes down. And then the battery, of course, can kind of you know, play a role, arbitraging those. And so you've got power markets structured around rectangles, and you got reality going off in the direction of spikes. And of course, one of the things that's happening is a lot of the incumbents are saying, 'No, rectangles, good. We must stick with rectangles.' But they're not going to win, are they?

No, I couldn't - I think it's a great analogy. Batteries are sort of a bit of finesse around the square edges, if you like. Eventually batteries and renewables will provide the squares and rectangles too. There is a lot of regulatory inertia - this is serious stuff, right? So if we get this wrong, the downside is pretty bad, you know, national blackouts and all of the second order effects from that. You can see why there is inertia and a safety in the system, and we don't want to change it too fast. But these assets are being built. The market opportunity is there. It is happening whether the regulators like it or not, and the market- the folks who design markets, like it or not.

So I got the new slogan for Modo, "turning spikes into rectangles"

We'll pay you a small fee on every time we say that.

Or perhaps turning "spikes into rectangles using programming and machine learning and clever stuff." But let's just get this in perspective, because all the batteries in the world will only run the world economy for a small number of minutes, correct? So how big can this be? The question is, how big can this get given the batteries are always going to be only so small?

Well, I would say this is an S-curve, right? And the world, people in general underestimate S-curves. You know this better than anyone. You've seen this last 20 years across the energy transition with renewables, and lots of other things happening. So lithium ion cells are an S curve, the costs are coming down. Even with all the other issues right now in the world with interest rates, we're still seeing battery energy storage systems being deployed at record rates. Right now, most assets in the world are somewhere between one and two hours of duration, so they can provide power for one or two hours. That's not long enough to get us through the really tricky bits of winter, right? Granted, but coupled with other asset classes and other generation types, it could be. And as the cost curve comes down, and you get more of these assets deployed- we're just at the start of this process, right? So there's a lot of folks in the Daily Mail or whatever that are saying, 'these things can only provide power to the UK for a few minutes or half an hour.' True right now, but you got to see where this thing is going.

But are you arguing that batteries will ever get us through, you know, the Germans they talk about the dunkelflaute, the dark doldrums, two weeks with very low wind, and I actually worry about- I worry about about a few bad wind years, followed by a bad wind month or two, followed by the dunkel flowers. I mean, I'm a security hawk. I really like the lights not to go out. Well, across the country and so on. But are you suggesting that batteries will ever do that kind of two week, three week, monthly, maybe even seasonal storage? Are you, are you seriously gonna make that case?

No, no, I don't think that. Actually, I'm gonna say something probably a bit controversial here. I think gas peakers, peaking plant, efficient gas engines have got a long term play and should do in this country for for that kind of situation. I do believe we have to invest in nuclear. So baseload, I think the best outcome is that's provided by nuclear and wind, and then gas peakers run in the really, really cold and not windy periods. And we use batteries to smooth around the edges. But yeah, I'm quite pro using gas peakers long term for shorter amounts of time to get us through those situations. Because gas speakers are very quick to deploy, we have the infrastructure, and we know how they work. And you can turn them on in a couple of minutes.

So I'm not going to go down the hydrogen rabbit hole of asking whether those gas peakers will be using unabated gas or hydrogen. I did not ask that, okay, because I want to stick with, you know, I think any view of the world, there are going to be an enormous number of batteries. So we can kind of stick there for the moment, we can take that on trust, lots and lots of batteries, grid-connected batteries, but also batteries in vehicles. So what happens as we get more and more transport batteries, are you kind of consigned to a kind of a grid connected battery ghetto? Or do you then expand your services? Do you have anything to offer to somebody who says, 'Well, I don't know, I've got 500,000 school buses in the US that are charging flexibly? Can you help me optimise them?'

So there's a couple of things here. So we don't do any optimization, we just provide the data and the benchmarking indices to help asset owners and operators and optimizers figure out what's happening in the market. So we're the infrastructure, the technology layer, if you like, and the data layer that these kinds of systems are built on top of. That's the first thing. And then what we do is we are specialised in grid-scale stuff. So big grid-scale, multi megawatt lithium ion battery systems, and also now solar and soon to be wind. I think that's enough for us to get on with. I think what's happening in electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid is really exciting, but it's not- although there are lots of parallels with what happens with grid infrastructure, it's not my area of expertise. And there's folks who know a lot more about that than me.

But there is a big picture of what's going on in the energy world, which you and I have spoken about, the energy-ization, or the kind of the equivalent of the financial services, you know, essentially finance also used to be big rectangles of finance, right, you'd have a bank account, and that would go up and down in a, you know, sort of fairly easy to understand way, and then you'd have maybe a pension or you'd have life insurance. And now everything gets financialized. And derivatives, and goodness knows what. And there's something similar going on in energy, as you have explained it to me.

Exactly. So we talk about this a lot at Modo energy. T his is the thing that we believe, and I'm going to tell a bit of a story here. So in the last 50 years, since the 1970s, the world has printed trillions of dollars of new assets. Some of these have been paper assets, some have been derivatives and financial mechanisms on top. And that has led to pretty much everything being, a widely used term now as financialized or financialization. So in the last 50 years, the world has financialized. And there's lots of second-order effects in that. But for all of these new assets, there's a load of benchmarking companies, research companies, indices, there's a whole ecosystem of companies which help investors figure out what's happening with these. Okay, that's what's happened in the last 50 years. What we believe is that the 21st century is all about energy-ization. So rather than printing $100 trillion of new paper assets, this time we're building new steel structures, like wind turbines, or lithium ion batteries, or other energy transition assets. And so Bloomberg reckons it's $120 trillion of investment between now and 2050. And those are eyewatering numbers. And our belief is all of those assets will have on top of them, equivalent to derivatives and other paper-style assets on top of them. So there's a massive market of physical assets and financialization on top of that. And so what we believe at Modo Energy is there's a space where there's a lot of value to be added in benchmarking these assets, providing indices of these assets and forecasting their performance. If you own a wind farm, it's got to sit on a balance sheet somewhere. And in order to value that on the balance sheet, you need to know what the future cash flows look like. So we help you figure out what the future cash flows look like and look at the past and figure out how the asset did in the past. That's the big vision, the big thing we're going after, and the big area that we can add a lot of value through data.

And, you know, you've already said you started on grid scale batteries. You kind of said no to transport batteries, and, you know, you and I were may need to talk about that, you know, investor to portfolio company, I'm not sure- you know, maybe I could persuade you that those are going to be entering the power markets, blocks of those assets will be entering the power markets, maybe in a way that you can, you know, add value to and analyse. But you've mentioned wind, you've mentioned solar. And I'm assuming you'll, you'll cover things like transmission grid, which right now is kind of owned by one person, has a very simple contract structure, but in future will be traded in all sorts of different spot, future, et cetera, risk management markets. So what's your expansion plan? What's your plan for world domination, Q?

You get my quarterly updates, you should see this in the quarterly updates, Michael! But world domination is one think. We think we'd like to do a small number of things really well. That's our strategy. And so that's why we look at grid scale batteries. We think that that's an interesting asset class with a lot of real time data issues with it. Wind and solar is a funny one. Wind and solar- we're moving to a post-subsidy world. And lots of wind and solar assets, which have been used to guaranteed revenues are now starting to look at fairly complex power markets and think about how they can trade power with those assets and make the most out of them. And then there's a bigger picture thing happening as well, which is two things. Firstly, all power markets- power as a thing, electricity as a thing, is unusual because until batteries, you couldn't store it. So you had to manage supply and demand all the time. And so generally contracts were long term contracts, you know, multi-week, multi-month multi-season contracts, and the whole power market, whichever way you look at it, is moving towards real-time because batteries enable real-time markets. So just like other spot markets and commodities, power will soon be fully real-time. It's now half-an-hour settlement periods in the UK, it will eventually become real-time Australia is now- it's called a five minute market. So that's a big thing. We're moving from long-term contracts to real-time. And then the second thing that's happening is the world is used to trading power. So megawatt hours, that's our unit. And flexible assets, or wind and solar, intermittent assets, there's a whole other plane of thinking around these, which is about availability, trading contracts for whether you'll be available or whether you can provide services, not just power. You may have heard of things like frequency response, or ancillary services. These are all niche parts of the electricity market that some some listeners won't really know or care about. But these are non power contracts where you're guaranteeing to another party that you'll be available when they need you. And all of this is complexity, and it's all moving to real time. And if we can get this right and design these markets, right, they can be highly liquid, and it will, that liquidity will provide a lower cost to everybody.

So this reminds me of conversations that I've had with Henry Lawson, my co-founder at EcoPragma Capital, because he spent a chunk of his career in the advertising industry, where you used to have executives buying a whole season of- a particular ad break in a particular sporting season or a particular soap opera, or whatever. And that would be it, done. And where that industry has ended up, of course, is people watching stuff and their eyeballs being sold on a kind of one ad impression, a couple of seconds basis with maybe a millisecond of lag. And so these kind of rectangular markets turn into these incredibly fast and spiky markets and the added complexity - you talk about these ancillary service markets. So it's kind of- it's then on steroids or raised to the power of whatever because of that. And I suppose it's pretty clear that that there's a huge need for data analytics, services, risk management, etc, etc. There is another point of view, though, as expressed by another guest of mine on Cleaning Up. So I had Yanis Varoufakis on Cleaning Up about a year ago now. And he said-

I'm a big fan of Yanis.

I'm a big fan of Yanis. But what he said, and in this space, he said, all of you guys are essentially just hoovering out money from good hardworking people -'m paraphrasing - none of this competition and pseudo-competition. It's all fake competition. And none of it- your information services are essentially informing people who should not, you know, who are not adding value, and the whole lot should be nationalised. What do you say to that?

Well, first, I would say, I'm a big fan of Yanis and the guy is an absolute rockstar, and I love his books. I would disagree strongly. So if we look at the world - of just look at batteries right now. These assets are developed and built by- it's very, very competitive: there's lots of different types of capital moving into the market, from utilities to funds to small developers, you know, one to five folks in a room building these things and going and raising money from the capital markets. It's incredibly competitive particularly in the UK in the US right now. I would agree that there is an issue of regulatory capture - this is a bit of a long conversation - but there is an issue of regulatory capture that isn't talked about enough in power. And I think, traditionally, power generators have had an awful lot of power and sway with the regulator. And, without sounding too much like a revolutionary, there is definitely a revolving door issue in our industry. So there's that there's a few aspects to it. But I personally believe that private investors are better allocators of capital than governments in general. And I think we need to move so fast and so efficiently with moving capital into renewables and smart grids that the best folks to do that are private entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial companies. Actually, you talk about Greg Jackson or other entrepreneurs who have disrupted this space. Technology can disrupt the big players by being 10x better anyway even if they do have all the power.

So I agree with you so it's gonna be a little hard for me to, you know, to argue Yanis' position, but he would say, 'we should get back to the time where one company owns the wind farm, owns a battery to make sure that there's always a backup, owns the wires and gets them to your house because your house has only got one electrical wire going in and out and that is going to be much more efficient than all these people running around and saying they allocate capital better, but without actually the information flows end-to-end that you need to run that system.

I think we'd agree on our position here, though, but I mean, it's like the phrase 'show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome, right.' And there's lots of mistakes that have been made. In the last 20 to 30 years, global governments have liberalised power markets, and they've done it in lots of different ways. You know, some have kind of done it in a semi-state kind of way. Some have really opened the doors to private capital; I think the UK is actually a leader globally in that. And there's everything in between completely liberalised and completely private, all the way down to a quasi-government. And there are some mistakes that have been made along the way. I think you need really bright forward thinking folks at the regulator, which I think actually, for the most part, we do have that in the UK. And you need- it needs to be managed by, you know, real, sensible governments. But, I believe that a private power system in the end delivers the three priorities of the energy trilemma, you know, security, supply, low-carbon and low cost to consumers. I think private markets are the best mechanism to do that. And I think you do, too, as well, Michael,

I'm doing my best to argue and to be, you know, to sort of squeeze some controversy out if I can here. But you know, but seriously, why is it that you know, wind is cheap, solar is cheap, and all this stuff is cheap, and batteries are getting cheap, and they've got all this information and Modo is there to help. Why is it that electricity for most people has never been as expensive?And it's not the wholesale- it's not the gas price, it's not the wholesale price, right? Because wholesale has been bouncing around and it's spiked a bit, and so on. It's the stuff in the middle. It's the stuff- it's your clients that are driving up the cost of electricity, isn't it?

Well, no. So the wholesale cost, the pounds per megawatt hour -I'm going to do this with a UK lens, a British lens, but this applies internationally - the wholesale cost is one part of it. Say it's 50 pounds a megawatt hour. And then on top of it, you have lots of different layers of costs ranging from transmission and distribution. So using the wires, all the way up to balancing the system, what you pay to national grid, some subsidies, like Contracts for Difference, or the feed in tariff and some other bits. So there's a range of costs in there. And they're all very, very different. Some, I'm a big fan of. So the way that the government kick started offshore wind in this country with a with a CFDs round, a contract for difference in the way that we pay for that and our bills, isn't very much in the grand scheme of things and actually kickstarted the windows industry, it was a great success. There are other elements to that are similar. I think one area that really does need to be looked at is and where privatisation didn't do such a good job is privatisation and I've said this publicly before, and it's probably quite controversial, but hey-ho. Privatisation of transmission and distribution, so this is the folks, the companies that own the transformers and the overhead lines and your connection, what we've seen is, originally the transmission-distribution companies were sold off to private companies. And what's actually happened was we started off with I think it was 10 or so and we now have much less, I don't know three or four I can't remember now. So there's been massive consolidation in that market. And then since those markets were "liberalised" the private companies that own those assets have essentially- you know they're heavily indebted, just like what happens with other utilities. And that has been a big issue, because in the end, it means under-investment in the infrastructure, and actually the bad outcome is for the end consumer in lots of ways. Not just cost, but also, you can't turn on the news or read a newspaper now as an energy nerd, without hearing about the queues and delays in connecting to the grid. So there's lots of batteries or wind farms or solar farms that are waiting to connect to the grid, and are being held up by a, well, a bureaucratic nightmare and a lack of connections. And that's a symptom of underinvestment in transmission and distribution companies, which the privatisation miracle didn't really work out in those industries. So yeah, I mean, there are- I do agree with Yanis actually in a couple of bits, which is that there are some elements, you know, how you divvy up the privatisation is really important. And some things where there really isn't any competition, you know, where you connect to a grid, and you can't choose whether you're going to be with electricity Northwest or Western Power, you don't have right as a consumer in that competitive landscape. And maybe there is an element for more heavy-handed regulation or even national ownership there.

Right. So there you go. I've got my headline: 'entrepreneur calls for nationalisation of national grid and the grid opera- and the the DNOs, the distribution, network operators.' And I'm sure, look, in other circumstances, I could be arguing that and you'd be arguing against it. But it's very important to examine these issues. So anyway, I think we're kind of reaching the end of our allotted time, I know that you've got a hard stop. And so, you know, what, what do you see for Modo, sort of what are the next- give me a few milestones for Modo and its business as an information provider around this asset optimization. What are some milestones that we, that I as an investor, that the audience should expect to see, either your company or in the markets.

So what really matters to us is getting clean energy assets built, and the grid to be appropriate to enable that. And so what we want to do is we want to help get as much capital moving into renewables and storage, where appropriate, and efficiently. So the milestones we really care about is getting gigawatts of wind and solar displacing fossil fuels. That's really what matters to us. I mean, our business, we joke, our business is a bit like New Energy Finance, but we but mainly written in Python, right, rather than analysts and Excel sheets, and all the other stuff that you guys used to do.

Hey, we were happy if we could produce a PDF, you know, back in the day 20 years ago, when I was starting New Energy Finance. No, it was a lot of Excel, actually there was a lot of a lot of database stuff, but it was not in- I don't think Python even existed,

Yeah, very similar value prop, but with the with different technology. And what really matters to us is, can- two things. Can we build the assets, and can the grid make the best of those assets? That's number one. The second thing which is really important to us as a business is we believe that we need a wartime like mobilisation of human capital, so people into energy-related jobs. And so the things that we do as a company is we invest a lot in, and we do educational videos and lots of content to help non-energy people move into energy related jobs, because we probably do need 50 to 100x times the people working on energy stuff in the next half a century. And that is a massive, massive change. There's lots of ways you can do it and we won't go into the details around education policy in the UK, but that seems to be the biggest barrier at the moment: people.

Very good. And to your point about content, you invited me onto your own Modo podcast. And so we'll put a link in the show notes to that as well. Quentin, Q, thank you so much for spending some time with us here today. Good luck with the business, both because I think it accelerates the transition, and of course, because I'm an investor.

Thanks for having me on Michael and good to chat with you as ever.

Always a pleasure you take care. So that was Quinton Draper-Scrimshire, CEO and founder of Modo Energy. And as always, we'll put links in the show notes to the episodes we mentioned in our conversation. So that is Episode 32, with Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy, and Episode 104 With Yanis Varoufakis, how to describe him? Left-wing firebrand politician, and would be nationalise of all things electric. And we'll also put into the shownotes a link to my appearance on Modo's podcast. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, please remember to like, share, and subscribe to Cleaning Up or leave us a review on your chosen podcast platform. And if you want more from Cleaning Up, sign up for our free newsletter at cleaningup.live, where you'll find our archive of over 150 hours of conversation with extraordinary climate leaders. And why not help someone else learn more about the net-zero transition by introducing them to Cleaning Up. Cleaning Up is brought to you by our lead supporter, Capricorn Investment Group, the Liebreich Foundation and the Gilardini Foundation.

Power of Data, Data of Power - Ep 140: Quentin Draper Scrimshire

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