Tech for Climate Action

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Can we decarbonise quicker without spending anything?
Just by using the energy grid in a more flexible way? 

The EU has an ambitious target that by 2030 renewable energy will account for 45% of our energy needs. Could this be a potential solution? Ralph Cochrane talks to Sympower's CEO & Founder Simon Bushell to find out more. 

Host: Ralph Cochrane
Produced by: event.video

Ralph: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the tech for climate action podcast in this episode we're looking at the energy grid.

Now The EU has set a target that 45 percent of energy will come from renewable sources by 2030 and there's so much innovation taking place in this space. I'm delighted to welcome Simon Bushell, who is the CEO and founder of Sympower

He's joining us from Amsterdam. Simon, first of all, welcome to the show. 

Simon: Thanks Ralph. It's great to be here. 

Ralph: I suppose the first question is what does Sympower do and how are you helping with this transition? 

Simon: In this whole transition to a renewable energy system. As you said, the EU set the ambition to get to 45 percent by 2030.

That means doubling the amount of renewable energy in the grid. And I think the way we see it is we have all the technology ready to do that. So wind and solar and so on. But actually there's a real missing piece, which is how we actually integrate it. those renewables into the system.

And [00:01:00] that's the piece where Sympower helps because what we do is we work on the demand side. So we work with large consumers of electricity, but also battery energy storage systems. And we use the flexibility of those, of the consumption or the flexibility of the batteries to help to balance the wind and solar that's coming into the grid.

So to put it simply, when there's more wind or solar energy being produced, we're making sure that the batteries are loading up or that the demand side flexibility. So consumers are using more electricity and when there's less electricity on the grid, then we're shutting things down, reducing electricity consumption so that supply and demand is always kept in balance.

And that's something that . Always had to be done, but traditionally is done with gas fired power plants that are basically adjusting their energy production to match our consumption. But in this future energy system, that's going to be largely dependent on renewables. We won't have that sort of luxury of being able to control the energy supply.

And so that's why solutions like sim powers are needed in order to get to that [00:02:00] 45 percent electricity generation by renewables. 

Ralph: And whereabouts is Sympower being used? Because I think you're in 10 countries, aren't you? Across Europe. 

Simon: That's correct. So yeah, I'm based in Amsterdam, as you said, we are, we're actually live and providing these services with yeah, commercial industrial customers in the Nordics.

Also here in the Netherlands and in Greece, and we're expanding to a few countries, mostly in Central Eastern Europe. So Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic as we speak. 

Speaker: So looking at the Nordics, which kind of lead the way, we've talked about that before on this podcast, what was the challenge that they were really trying to solve and how is it going for them?

Simon: The interesting thing about the Nordics is that. In similar way to the UK, the Nordics are a sort of separate electricity grid from the rest of Europe. They are connected to to, to the continental Europe European electricity grid, not in [00:03:00] a synchronized way. So with DC, with a DC connection rather than AC connection.

And that means that when there's something basically goes wrong on their grid. So imagine a big power plant trips. It's a big power plant trips in. The Netherlands, then you have the whole of the rest of Europe of the European grid that is ready to absorb that change.

But in the Nordics, it's a much smaller grid. And so if power plant trips there and has a much bigger impact on the imbalance in the grid. Because of that, and also due to the high penetration of renewables in the Nordics, they've got a lot of hydro, but also a lot of wind coming in now and a decent amount of solar as well.

That means that kind of that imbalance and that that uncertainty in how to manage the grid is much more pronounced than the rest of Europe. And so that's led them to have to be more innovative in getting, solutions like like sim powers, multi flexibility, and now increasingly batteries as well.

Ralph: Tell us a little bit about how you came to found Sympower because you mentioned it's been a [00:04:00] few years you've been working in this space. This area has moved on tremendously, hasn't it? And yet some of the challenges are the same challenges that we had decades ago. We're just interested in what's your background?

How come you created Sympower? 

Simon: I think we're in the, I don't know, at least second, maybe third wave of of these kind of companies. You or maybe these kinds of solutions. So you remember, a long time ago, I grew up in England and, you have these kind of day and night tariffs.

You had even storage heaters that would, start heating up at night. That's a very kind of early. form of what we're doing. Sim power today. Then you had a kind of another wave of companies in the early two thousands of one of we have an executive advisor called Tim Healy, who was the CEO and founder of a company called Anna knock that was founded in 2001.

And they were also trying to help balance the grid, but again, in a much more kind of manual manner. So they were literally, picking up the phones, people saying, Hey, can you shut down your factory for, the next four hours or whatever, in order to help balance the grid.

And now, [00:05:00] as we have this, acceleration in the energy transition, we're really moving towards that. Yeah, renewable energy system, and we really need a lot more of these types of solutions. And they also need to be a lot more, sophisticated. So where, there's old there's all types of demand response were slow acting and so on.

We have we're, ours is completely software based. So we yeah, so in some of the services we provide we have to respond within 0. 7 seconds to an imbalance on the grid So yeah, and we're doing that across, hundreds if not thousands of locations across across the country So yeah, just to go back to your question.

How did I end up at founding sim power? So I guess I it goes back to my first university degree. I studied sciences. I really enjoyed sciences and but I decided I didn't want to spend the rest of my life working in a science lab. So I took some time to figure out what it was I wanted to do with my life and having studied chemistry, I already knew a little bit about this problem of climate change and knew about the science of it.

But in the kind of year I took to figure out what it was I [00:06:00] wanted to do with my career, I decided that really, for me, climate change is the biggest and most important problem that we have. I see it as the overarching problem. I think there's a lot of other really important problems to solve in the world, but if you don't solve climate change, then there's not much point in solving the other problems.

So I decided I wanted to do something about it, but I didn't know much about what the solutions to climate change were. So I applied to study a master's in sustainable energy, which I did at Imperial college in London. And that's where I first heard together with the other students there about this this problem of balancing and actually yeah, we were inspired by by one of our, one of our lecturers there who was talking about the refrigerators in people's homes in the UK.

And if you added up all the fridges you would get the same amount of power as a nuclear power station. So that was a moment where we kind of tried to put one of the two and two together and thought, okay, maybe we can use those fridges to balance the grid. I still think it's a very nice idea.

However, the business case is absolutely terrible, so we didn't get very far with with that idea. But then after spending a year working as an energy consultant in London, I decided to, I [00:07:00] wanted to just do something a bit more impactful and quit my job and founded Sympower back in 2015. And in the beginning, the idea was still to to solve this balancing problem with with households.

And then we quickly pivoted to B2B solutions after about a year of after founding the company. 

Ralph: So let's dig into that. A little bit, if I'm a business, I'm actually sat on a farm at the moment, for example, some of the things they do here they use quite a lot of energy and there's also solar panels all around.

At a very simple level, they're trying to generate their own electricity and store it and then use it. And I think most people who have put solar panels on their house understand. The concept that, during daylight, maybe I should be doing my washing, which is, as you say, having, we both grew up in the UK certainly for me, I would always have done my washing when I came home from work before, whereas solar kind of makes you think a bit differently.

Then battery storage came along, makes it a bit easier. [00:08:00] But you're talking about large businesses. So back to farming or factories. What is the sort of balancing that needs to happen and how do you convince Those companies to use the sim power because at the end of the day it's software, isn't it?

It's very clever software controlling how all of this balances. Can you just explain a little bit about how that works? 

Simon: Sure. Yeah, so I think the farm you mentioned you're sitting on is a really nice example because What we're doing is trying to do that same thing. So you're trying to use You know as much of your own electricity as possible.

And so you are basically balancing how much you use, how much you store with, how much is generated at any one time. We're trying to do that or we're doing that across the whole grid in a country. And so how that works, if we were coming to, let's say the pharmaceutical on is we would come in and we would.

Start off with try to understand where your electricity consumption is, where the big consumers electricity are. So maybe somewhere it's heating, maybe there's some calling, [00:09:00] maybe there's some big machines that are working. And then we'd work with you to understand where the flexibility in. Those that electricity consumption is.

And so what we mean by flexibility is the ability to sometimes turn something on when it otherwise would have been off or sometimes turn it off when it otherwise would have been on or sometimes shift electricity consumption. So for example, you are heating a space and actually you could say we're going to turn that heating off for half an hour during, during the day which will of course reduce the temperature slightly.

Okay. But it probably won't have a big impact on, on, whatever's happening in in, in that in that building. So then once we figure that out, we then connect some hardware to the machinery. And that allows us to have some control over the electric over the machine.

So the energy consumption of those machines, and also allows us to measure the energy consumption. And then we. Combine all of those different machines that we've connected across hundreds of customers, thousands of locations in a [00:10:00] country, and we pull that together with our software platform, and that allows us to have this pool of different consumption that we can control in response to there being an imbalance on the on the national energy grid.

Ralph: So coming back to the example here of the farm, if I sign up. To the Sympower service, there's got to be some financial benefit as well, so part of it is I may not know, to keep going with the farming analogy, let's talk about onions. So onions need drying out after they've been harvested, by the way, I'm not, I should say I'm not a farmer.

I just happened to be based here. I live in Aurora but they need a lot of drying out. So they're put in, into a big shed and the temperature is kept a certain. Certain sort of point that these onions dry out and then they're sold. If I use your software, then I don't necessarily need to heat that barn all of the time, or when somebody else needs it.

But do I see some financial benefit or is it just that I'm being [00:11:00] a good citizen by connecting up with the software? 

Simon: So I love that example because actually one of our one of the industries that we work quite a lot with in, in the Nordics is the pulp and paper industry. And one of the, one of the assets we control there is actually wood drying where exactly the same thing.

So you have these huge chambers filled with words where there's sort of hot air pumped around for. 120 hours in order to dry that wood. And it's a great example of in that 120 hours if there's a few times when that heating process is turned off Then you know, it doesn't have any actual impact on the overall Drying process.

Yeah, so it's a great example. And yeah, you're absolutely right So we get paid to supply these services to the grid . So in the UK, that would be to national grid repairs to supply those services. We take a cut of that of that income, but the majority of it goes to the owners of, in this case the onion drying facility.

And and that's the incentive for taking part. And I think that's one of the [00:12:00] great things about our business model. Is we are one of the few things you can do as a business where you are contributing to the energy transition, you're contributing to a greener grid, and there's no upfront costs.

All you're doing is getting paid. And it can be quite a significant amount of money. Obviously depends on the, the size of the facility and on how much flexibility you have. But typically we're seeing people getting about five to 20 percent of their total electricity bill back from us by providing these flexibility services.

So essentially the kind of a deal we're making with you is we're sometimes going to be turning off that onion drying process, but in a way that doesn't affect the overall outcome. And in exchange, we're going to pay you some money. 

Ralph: I suppose as well, it could go the other way. So if I, as an onion farmer, I decide to expand into somewhere else and I think oh, I just need to you know, the weather's cold right now.

I just need a [00:13:00] bit more power Then I can buy it through you as well. Can I 

Simon: there are some moments? And actually increasing number of moments on the grid when Actually, there's too much electricity. So yeah, you mentioned solar before you're going to get these, cold, windy, sunny days, but increasingly that's going to be every day when there's going to be moments when there's too much electricity on the grid.

So what we also do, and again, let's just keep going down this onion farmer analogy is we would say, okay, let's actually make sure, maybe The onions only need to try for 10 hours in the week, and there's a whole week when you can drive them in and we say, okay, let's make sure we're using those over supply hours to actually try the onions on.

In that case, you're then benefits very cheap, maybe even free or maybe even getting paid to use electricity at those times. So it's indeed the kind of most obvious examples of where you're right. Reducing electricity consumption because there's too much being consumed at one moment. [00:14:00] The classic example of that in the UK again is it's during halftime at football matches.

Everyone goes to the kitchens, makes a cup of tea. There's this huge spike in electricity consumption. It's about the same. Exactly. It's about the same as as as turning on two coal fired power plants. But instead we could reduce consumption on the basis. So that's the kind of the classic example.

But increasingly, with more and more renewables on the grid, actually using electricity at the right time of day is going to also be really important. 

Speaker: Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? So you must have some real insights into the trends. I love the example there of the halftime during the football.

We all love a cup of tea and increasingly coffee in the UK. What other kind of interesting insights have you got for us? And also does it vary across Europe? And you mentioned the Nordics, but you also mentioned Greece and Greece has got a lot more sunshine, I would say than the Nordics. But maybe not so much hydro, I don't know.

There's some really interesting sort of data there, isn't there, about what people [00:15:00] actually do. 

Simon: Definitely. And I think that's one of the things that is so exciting and interesting about what we do at Sympower is we are a software company, about half the team, about 250 people on the team, about half of those are software engineers, or at least on the software product side of things.

And yet what we do is so rooted in the physical world which is, I think it makes it a really interesting problem for a lot of people to be working on. But yeah, it's a great example because for example in, in Greece, they are right at the end of the peninsula, literally, which means that they have a very limited number of Connections.

So literally physical electricity connections to the rest of the European grid. And as you mentioned, they also have a lot of solar, a lot of wind. And so the sort of challenges that they're dealing with are quite different from country like the Netherlands or somewhere else in kind of the middle of Europe where you have lots of interconnectors to lots of other countries and and [00:16:00] very different dynamics in terms of sun and wind and so you really see that even though there is increasingly moving towards a little too slowly, but maybe we have a chance to talk about that later.

The harmonized system to do this in, in, in Europe. Actually, the physical constraints, the physical differences between each country are quite different. Maybe in, in terms of kind of examples of of things that are happening. And then, yeah, sort of Nordic examples, because that's where we spent a lot of our time over the last few years is a couple of interesting things happened over the last years is that there's been some new power, new nuclear power plants that have come online.

And some of the biggest kind of imbalances in the system have been due to, as they've been starting up and having some teething problems, then tripping, and you can imagine taking a huge nuclear power plant offline and that happening almost instantly is yeah it's pretty difficult for the system to cope with, but again, fortunately the Nordic energy system has built systems like like working with us to to be able to cope with those things. Another really interesting one that's happened. Yeah, [00:17:00] in the last couple of years, a couple of times actually, is there's this big interconnector.

So literally a big electricity cable between the Nordics. And I think it's the one with Germany or might be Denmark. And what's actually happened is that it's not just that it's stopped Transporting electricity in one direction, but actually through a software error, it's flipped from transporting electricity in one direction to transporting the same amount of electricity in the other direction.

So you can imagine that's like a double hit on the electricity system in the Nordics, which is, yeah, which is again. The grid operators in the Nordics have to design a system to be able to cope with things happening like that as well. 

Ralph: Yeah. I started my career actually in nuclear energy and I remember being told, this was a few years ago.

I remember being told you can do anything you like when you're writing software, but if you trip the turbine, you're fired. So I feel for the people in the Nordics, that doesn't sound like a good result, but it's also interesting. I wouldn't talk to you [00:18:00] about the flexibility gap. It's something that you've talked about before.

There's a lot of ambitious targets and actually seeing my personal connections are to Ireland and also to the UK. And certainly in the UK, the policy here is definitely to focus on net zero. To try and do everything they can, but there's some really difficult decisions and a lot of offshore wind has been put in particularly off the coast here.

But that needs to interconnect with the grid somewhere. A lot of resistance to larger pylons, for example, to digging up fields for cables, putting solar farms onto field. There's so many. Issues that when you first start down this route, you think, oh yeah, the, we should be doing more, we should be having renewables.

But of course, we're now into this phase, as you described at the start of our chat, where we've perhaps taken the loaf hanging fruit I'm keeping going with the farming analogies. We've picked the low [00:19:00] hanging fruit and we're now into some of these really difficult. Issues that are about planning, but coming back to this flexibility gap, so huge ambitious targets from the EU.

45 percent of energy will be from renewable sources by 2030. Do you think we're on track? What can be done to bring us closer to that target? 

Simon: Almost all the technology we need, at least in the short term is, we have, and so you're right. It turns more into a policy issue, but also a big thing at the moment is indeed about grids.

If you look at the Netherlands, for example where I'm based, it's quite difficult now to find The grid capacity anywhere to be able to install more solar, it's all batteries and so on. And and what I think Sympower we find quite frustrating is that there is this huge kind of untapped resource that we are sitting on, which is this, this [00:20:00] flexibility of consumption.

 It's not a, it's not a technology thing. At the end of the day, we turn things on and off, it couldn't be more simple. But it's about having the right policies, the right incentives in place to actually make sure that.

And again, I'm going to go back to the analogy that the farm where you're based, that they are actually incentivized to use as much of their own electricity as possible. Or maybe it's not even maybe it's not that they use as much electricity as possible, but actually them and the and the village nearby are You know connected to the main grid in one place and actually the behind that grid, they need to make sure that they're balancing the electricity as well, their consumption and production as much as possible.

And that's all, that we have the technology for it. You have the, the software's there, the hardware's there. We have everything we need. It's just about getting that, that, that policy in place and those right incentives aligned. And then yes, we will still need to You know build a lot more infrastructure.

We'll have to, bury a lot more [00:21:00] cables into the ground and so on and so forth, but a lot less than if we just try to do this using, yeah, using the old way of doing it, which is more cables yeah, more interconnectors. So I think we're really happy, at least from a European perspective, that in the, for the new European commission, the there were some guidelines given to the new commissioner for energy that really explicitly talked about.

Flexibility using energy storage and really focusing also on energy efficiency. I think one thing from a Sympower perspective that we sometimes find a little bit frustrating is that we work with batteries as well and we think that batteries are going to be a really important part of the future energy system however the demand side I think it's a bit less sexy, but it's a, an untapped resource that you need very little in terms of investment, but also very little in terms of, metals and precious metals and those kinds of things. So actually what we would love to see and what we advocate for a lot at a European level [00:22:00] is and also in the countries we work in is to make sure that we're approaching these grid problems is balancing problems in a technology agnostic way.

So that demand side response can be a part of that solution as well as as well as batteries, which is where the hype is at the moment. 

Ralph: I suppose as well you need harmonization across these different countries in terms of the regulations as well, because if you're, if the complexity is actually how you get paid and what legal commitments you've got, that can become quite difficult, as you say, the technology.

You understand you spent years working with it. How harmonized are things across the countries that you operate in? Or is there still more work to be done there? 

Simon: There's a huge amount of work to be done there. So already in 2019 in the EU's Energy Efficiency Directive, they mandated that all countries need to open up all of their electricity markets to independent [00:23:00] demand side aggregators .

Hopefully most of those words now make sense after the rest of the podcast, but, um, some countries are doing that to an extent. And some countries have almost barely started. . And so the first thing that we want to see is for member states to actually implement that directive and actually to allow demand side aggregators to participate.

That would already be a fantastic step for the industry, for the energy transition. And it's also, again, it's a relatively easy thing to do in that you don't need to. Invest lots of money into it. You just need to change the change of legislation a second step that I think Is starting to happen in some places but is indeed about harmonization.

We work in You know in as I mentioned before, five different countries are live Five countries we're working on, on, on getting live. And in every country the rules, regulations are a little bit different. The way that you interact with the grid with the grid operator is a little bit different.

 Almost always, even [00:24:00] in between the different services we offer, the way that you interact with the grid is different as well. So it's this kind of huge patchwork of different regulations, integrations, and so on and so forth, which makes. Yeah, what we're trying to do, which is build this pan European platform pretty challenging.

So yeah that's another thing we're really pushing for at both European and member state level. 

Ralph: Yeah there's certainly quite a few policymakers who listen to this podcast. So I suppose I should give you the opportunity if you've got one message for them both within the European institutions, but also locally within some of the member states, what would it be?

Simon: I guess it would be that you're sitting on this untapped resource that has the potential to significantly reduce the the costs of the energy transition. It also has the ability to speed up the energy transition, which also means, in the current context, speeding up [00:25:00] towards energy independence and so on and so forth, but also it.

again, one of the things I love about what we do is it puts the money into the hands off of the commercial industrial businesses that we work with. And so we're actually helping industry to become more competitive. But I also love to see happening is some of our customers. Starting to think actually I want to switch from gas to electricity, for example, for heating.

So let's think about how I can build a business case that includes flexibility that actually makes it easier to switch over. So you get all this kind of positive effects and this is all for, more or less free. You're not, there's no investment needed from the countries from in this.

So yeah, you're sitting on this on tap potential. All you need to do is, change legislation that has already been piloted in lots of countries. It's not something new or crazy. We're here to help where, we've really enjoyed working with, in Greece, for example, with a regulator and the grid operator that we've helped them to bring the right regulations into place to allow.

[00:26:00] Companies like us to to operate. And yeah we really, I really encourage everyone to do that to help speed up this this energy transition. And 

Ralph: I think speaking as somebody who runs a small business saving five to 20 percent of your energy costs for really not, as you say, not a lot of investment, it's not.

The same decision as when you're thinking, shall I put Shanta or how much solar do I put in, for example, and I know it's not just about solar with your software, but just thinking of my farming friends here. Yeah, that is pretty compelling business case when you're talking about that kind of percentage saving.

Simon: Absolutely. And then maybe you can use that five to 20 percent to then invest in solar in the future. And then you 

Ralph: yeah great point. Tell us a little bit about the future. What are your plans for Sympower? Where are you going next? 

Simon: I think at Sympower we really believe that this energy transition this climate change challenge is something that has to be tackled at a sort of pan European level.

And so that's why we're trying to [00:27:00] build a really strong, European player in this flexibility space and our and within that, we want to be managing supply demand and storage across Europe to really help that The grid to work as effectively and efficiently as possible so that we can get to that, 45 percent but hopefully very quickly, 100 percent renewable energy in the grid as quickly as possible.

Really? 

Ralph: Simon, it's been absolutely fascinating talking to you. I'd love to see Sympower in action as well. So if anybody is listening and wants to find out more, how do they get in touch? 

Simon: The easiest way is via our website, so Sympower net. And on there you can find a ton of information about what we do.

And yeah some, very concrete examples to make it a little bit more tangible, but also a ton of sort of knowledge about the background knowledge about the energy industry and how energy markets work, which I think it continues to [00:28:00] fascinate me even after working for 10 years in this in the industry.

Ralph: Thank you so much for your time. And if you've been listening to this podcast and you think what a fascinating discussion about onions and farming and tech for climate action, please make sure you hit subscribe and as the YouTubers say, tell a friend, thank you.