Show notes
Laura Fleming and Alfredo Parres from Hitachi Energy dive into the critical challenges of integrating renewable energy, particularly offshore wind power, into the UK grid. They explore innovative solutions, including HVDC technology and digital advancements, that are driving efficient, reliable energy distribution and shaping the future of the global energy landscape. With Laura's over 25 years of experience in the energy sector and Alfredo's long history in renewables, the two give insights into how Hitachi is making the energy transition possible.
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Allen Hall: With power grids adapting to accommodate growing renewable energy, the challenges of integration had never been more critical. This week, we speak with Alfredo Parres group, senior Vice President and head of Renewables at Hitachi Energy. And Laura Fleming, country managing director at Hitachi Energy UK and Ireland.
Together, they explain how Hitachi's technology is enabling efficient, reliable connections between massive wind farms and our existing electrical infrastructure. This is a great interview. Stay tuned.
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Allen Hall: Laura and Alfredo, welcome to the podcast.
Laura Flemming: Glad to be here.
Alfredo Parres: Hey, huh.
Allen Hall: How are you? Laura, let's start with you because I've watched a number of your interviews on YouTube and there's just a lot happening within Hitachi. What are some of the main challenges in the UK facing sort of the renewable energy grid and all of the particularly wind power, which is what we're focused on.
There's a lot of wind power offshore being deployed in the UK at the minute. How is a Hitachi trying to handle that and distribute that energy?
Laura Flemming: Yeah. Thank you for the question. And uh, it's a super exciting time, as you're saying in in the uk energy space. And maybe just to explain briefly what is going on the UK.
At the moment, it's very hard at work to decarbonize the electricity grid. It's actually planning to be fully carbon zero by 2030. That's only in five years time now. And that's obviously a very big job. What we're doing in order to reach that as a country is switching away from from carbon sources.
And so about six weeks ago. We switched off our last coal-fired power station, for example. But of course we still need energy and we still need a lot of electricity. So what we're doing instead is building out a lot of renewable energy predominantly offshore wind because that allows us to produce vast amounts of electricity quickly cheaply and sustainably.
The result of all of that is that actually we're producing electricity in very different places than that we used to. So offshore wind, obviously produced in the sea, mainly in the north of Scotland particularly in Scotland. But the demand centers are all in the s of the country, predominantly around London and Birmingham areas.
So we needing to transport this electricity around the system in a very different way. And all of that is triggering lots of grid reinforcements requiring to be done as well. So, and obviously without that grid, we can't move around this this new electricity from the generation source to the to the demand centers in a very efficient and also in a reliable way.
And also making sure that we don't have too many losses on the system. So this is a huge task. The role that Hitachi energy in is playing in all of this is to ensure that a large number of these offshore wind projects can be connected to the UK grid. We are also supporting the transmission owners to help build out the grid, to make it more flexible, more reliable, and more efficient.
And then we're also supporting, for example, onshore and solar generators connecting their projects in via, via substations, et cetera.
Allen Hall: Alfredo, what happens if the, this interconnection doesn't happen to the UK economy and more? Wider impacts in terms of Europe. It does seem Laura has mentioned a lot of the energy sources are coming from remote places, but the power is being used in kind of the big places.
Paris, London in Germany, there's just big power usage areas. If we don't connect them, what's the outcome of that?
Alfredo Parres: Yeah. I think it's fair to say that it's difficult to think about an energy transition without grids. Grids, electricity is about to be everything as we move on. And we need a lot of those.
And grids that's in many places are also oldish. Depending where you are on the world can have assets where that are pretty old. So we need to pay attention to that. The good news on this, a Noel, as I like to say, is that I see that. The conversation on grid has evolved drastically, compared to a to previous years.
I see the conversation as has already evolved a lot, typically in my early days in, in this business it's a few years. We had to educate people, educate governments on the importance of grids, anticipating what was coming, or it was a lot of education to be done. These days, you go to any conference, any civil servant speaks about grids as well as I do.
So that means they, they are aware, they've educated themselves, they know what they're talking about. And they the connections, I think in Europe, if you think about the grid action plan that the commission has put together is looking at implementing. I think that speaks what I'm mentioning here, the plans are there and the options to do things are huge.
From increasing capacity or improving the usage of the existing grids. That's the first step we can do. Technologies are there to do that, building new grids and planning the development of new grids. There are things that are doing, so in a nutshell, Alan, and we can go in further details in the conversation, there is no energy transition without greats good news or politicians or governments.
Got it. We start putting the real
Joel Saxum: actions required, I think to speak on this problem here with grids and integration with renewables. Again, for the energy transitions. Someone once said there'll be no transition without transmission. I like that statement. But to speak on that issue more when these, when the grid that we're, that we've lived with for, a long time it was originally developed. Most of that was with this consistent power delivery to it, right? It was coal fired power plants and other sources where it was consistent. And now when we add renewables to the mix, and they are by nature, intermittent, whether it's solar or wind or however and people are trying to control that now as we move forward with battery storage and things.
It complicates that grid question as well because now we're saying, Hey, we need to upgrade the grid, but we also need to upgrade and future proof the grid, and I think that's a very important statement there as well. And Hitachi, that's what you guys are doing. You've got loads of people working on these problems to solve this intermittent delivery issues.
And that's hand in hand with the contemporary term, I guess is the smart grid. So Alfredo, I'd like to ask you this question. At what point in time did you start to see, the stakeholders that can make some of these decisions around the grid start to open their eyes to the difference that we need to future proof this?
The energy mix looks different, and if we don't fix this, we're gonna really run into issues
Alfredo Parres: beside grids. We are spending a lot of time to tell exactly about that. It's not just the grid, it's the complexity of the power system we are developing. We are going to manage intermittent source of generation.
Different side of science type of generation based on power electronics, which basically says it's a generation profile that is much more volatile with less inertia. We will have to manage all those elements in a harmonious way because we want to keep a sustainable power system at power safe and save power system.
So the education is happening and we see the message getting there. As I said, you think from a planning perspective and everything start with planning. There's no point to try to solve it if you don't have a visibility 5, 10, 15, 20 years ahead to see what are we going to need? What are the investments we going to need?
What is infras going to need? And that is happening. We still, of course, need to always to improve, and that's what we're talking right now with the authorities, know how we can improve the planning piece on the technology side, we tell them technology exists to manage this complexity we're going to face.
Intermittency is not the end of the world. It should not stop penetration of renewables. We can bring much more into the system and technologies are there to help us for electronics. These things we use for batteries management to use fax, all those system, I have to stabilize grids to be the HVDC connections.
Essential to keep the stability, to keep this flow of energy oriented in different directions. Digital, absolutely key. Also because digital will help us to manage this complexity we're facing. From a demand perspective, from a generation perspective, to operate, to maintain, the digital piece absolutely key.
And that's a not so easy story to get through because digital, not everybody understand what it means. For real. We are Hitachi, we make it as a party for us,