The Rethink Energy Podcast complements the Rethink Energy weekly strategy bulletin, as we dive deeper into the dynamic factors of the energy market. We discuss the week’s key issues, while providing insight into our own research and forecasts to give clearer direction of where momentum is building through the energy transition.
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-RWE and TotalEnergies have signed a 30,000-ton annual green hydrogen supply deal to run from 2030 to 2044 – how can green hydrogen production become cost-effective in the context of the German energy crisis?
-Kelin Electric has announced an intention to raise $200 million for a 1 GW perovskite cell and module factory – but its product offering appears to be the peculiar single-junction, full-weight type being pursued by several Chinese companies, which has a less obvious business case compared to tandems.
-Spain’s utility Iberdrola is upgrading its pre-existing hydropower reservoirs to pumped hydro – a huge potential storage reservoir for Western Europe.
-The UK has announced it will expedite offshore wind permitting times, potentially halving lead times in the world’s second-largest market for such projects.
-Some perovskite solar manufacturers have raised the funding they need to fund mass production and commercialisation – but many others haven’t yet, in the context of economic uncertainty and a looming recession.
-Data centers are pursuing a mixture of renewable energy, gas, and nuclear power to ensure they have a supply of sustainable, reliable and affordable power, in a microcosm of the energy trilemma
-A 2,600-kilometer submarine HVDC line has been proposed to link New Zealand and Australia – with huge arbitrage potential across demand peaks over a 2-hour timezone distance.
-Europe’s leadership has proposed a $100 billion clean manufacturing fund – is this enough to finally shore up domestic manufacturing in the face of China and the US’ Inflation Reduction Act?
-The IEA has published a report on the lengthening lead times and supply bottlenecks for transmission infrastructure – this problem will shape Western energy deployments for decades to come, skewing investments in favour of distributed resources and microgrids.
-Flexible solar panel products are appearing using silicon cells, demonstrating that the limiting technology is more the encapsulation solution rather than the need for flexible semiconductors such as perovskite.
-HD KSOE is exploring the development of a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) built into a container ship – and floating nuclear could be useful off US coasts as well.
-China will switch its renewable energy power projects over to market-based pricing from June 1st 2025, while also abolishing battery co-location requirements, following on from ever steeper time-of-day pricing, and a 2024 reform which introduced capacity payments for coal and gas plants. China’s reform parallel the more gradual reforms cutting Feed-in tariffs and Net Metering across multiple Western markets.
-The Trump Administration intends to boost domestic oil and gas production and exports – this is bad news for renewable energy investments worldwide, as would a loosening of sanctions on Russia, but transmission is the main limiting factor in many mature markets anyway.
-Compressed-air energy storage (CAES) is being built out in artificial excavations in China at prices which aren’t wholly worse than lithium-ion BESS, considering the relative youth of the technology.
-Perovskites and solid-state batteries face the same problem – the mainstream technologies of silicon PV and LFP batteries are already cheap and high quality, and are also still improving their quality, preventing a ‘moving target’ to the more innovative future replacement.
-As the Baltic states switch synchronization from the Russian to the Western European grid, construction will soon begin at an Estonian pumped hydro project with deep underground excavation works. meanwhile Norway has backed off from an offshore wind expansion which would have increased its international transmission connection across the North Sea.
-Australia’s CSP company, Vast, is working towards FiD at its Port Augusta project – concentrated solar power is niche, but by no means dying off.
-China’s north is the most likely site for the world’s green hydrogen, but actual project construction remains low in absolute terms, with more price improvement needed to become truly profitable.
In this episode of Rethink Energy Talks, we’re joined by Jorg Heinemann, CEO of EnerVenue – whose nickel-hydrogen energy storage batteries promise 30,000-cycle lifespan, enduring draining to zero, partial discharge, and potentially scaling to up to 12 hours of storage duration. So this is a long-duration energy storage battery product with manufacturing now being scaled up but with other points of appeal too, such as being made in the US.
-With DeepSeek and other LLMs achieving reduced energy intensity, data centers in the US can still add easily 40 TWh of power demand per year – under President Trump, some of this will be met by gas plants.
-Batteries have replaced gas plants in the new-build category in the Polish and UK capacity markets – but when will the capacity market be designed around long-duration storage instead?
-Western wind OEMs have posted restored profits and have returned to the pursuit of large-size turbine designs, after a multi-year period of cost pressure.
-DeepSeek and other new AI models promise the same performance for one order of magnitude less power consumption – does this really change forecasts for load on the grid?
-China’s battery exports are up 17.1% year-on-year in December by volume – but the dollar value was stuck at $60 billion for 2024, the same as previous years, as prices decline and volume expands.
-Shandong Province provides some statistics about the interaction between EV ownership, Virtual Power Plant expansion, and EV charging power demand.