With Laurent's Segolan from London and Gerard Read from Berlin. This is redefining energy
minutes, John, Now way are doing our minutes on the main show.
Hey, looking forward to It's the first one and it should have been number
ninety nine, but now it's number one fourteen. I have no idea why.
Well, you're in charge of the numbers, so yeah, I can
only blame you. We have number of the week ninety LA per pound,
per pound, ninety per pound. That's a very good question. Give me
a little bit of a clue, is it. I could say something that
really looks stupid, right, I was going to say it's probably uranium,
right it is? Oh, it is, okay, because I was going
to say something even worse. So I'm glading out right because I don't want
to look stupid on the at the beginning of the year. Okay, all
right, And it was the best performing commodity, going up eighty percent in
two twenty three. But it's a very tiny market so you can't really trade
it. Yeah it is. But you know the funny thing is it's probably
the only investment that I've done that's done well over the last year and a
half because I invested into what's called the sprout ETF. I don't know if
you've heard of this, Oh yeah, yeah, okay, so just so
those are people who are you know, obviously the uranium market's quite small,
but what actually happened was there is an exchange traded fund. I think he's
at a Canada, isn't he? Okay, he's out of North America.
Anyway, what he decided to do was to start buying physical uranium, and
he's now got so much uranium bought that it would supply all of the French
nuclear fleet for two years. And he's taken the margin supply out of the
market. That's what he's done, and the prices have just gone to the
roof. Yeah. So anyway, that's the only good investment I did in
in the public markets in the last year. La on crazy crazy crazy.
It is though funny market uranium. It is so took about nuclear. We
starting to have the twenty three data because most of the time the nuclear industry
likes to use that are three to five years old. So if I look
in Europe, the nuclear production in two twenty three versus two twenty two is
only up nine hour, which is really not much with more French supply,
but we have less coming from the UK and less of course from Germany,
so it's almost flat. If I look at the US, it's plus one
hour, so nothing in the US. The big event was plus one hundred
of gas and one hundred of coal, so that was the big event.
And even if I look at China, nuclear is minus sweeter what hour.
So over Europe US China nuclear production two or twenty three is flat. It's
flat. So what about new builder and stuff like that. I haven't looked
at the chart on that. I think the big news, and that is
really massive, is the return of what I call Godzilla in Japan. Godzilla
is the biggest nuclear plant in the world and it has been stopped for ten
years and finally the Japanese regulator has authorized them to restart. And I'm going
to quote the name. It's the Keshi Waza key Caiwa Plant eight point two
gigawat, so I guess they have Yeah, they have put six or seven
nuclear plant next to one another. It's of course by the sea, but
it's facing Korea. Did a lot of safety pollen. But if they restart,
it's so huge it will spare Japan five billion dollars of ell engine port
per year. My god. That might be counterbalanced by the fact that they've
just hit by a tsunami and they've had to close a whole pile of the
nuclear plants, right, I mean sorry, it is a serious issue when
you just think of it, is that you have to cool these plants and
where do you put them either potamon rivers or you put them on seas It's
another one of the issues that nuclear face is going forward, right, Yeah,
but look, the plants are there and being they've been chicking safety for
the past ten years, so fully you know, it's not going to be
as bad as Fukushima. I guess they learn their lessons. But the thing
is they are all fully expensive to build. But once they are there,
you want them to run as much as possible because especially if country like Korea
Japan, which are energy pour needs to import pretty much all over the energy
it's not having nuclear, it is a huge burden. No sorry, listen,
I'm totally which are a nuclear I mean nuclear is part of the future
and if it's built, well, we should keep these things running. Simple
as that it's clean energy. Yeah, it's clean, it's a good baseload,
but the number of passionate supporter they have is pretty phenomenal. But if
you look at the result, okay, two or twenty three, another flat
year, it is. But let's be clear one thing. There's a big
difference for the Europeans between twenty twenty three Christmas and the year before, and
that is the French nuclear plants are up and running. I think you've got
fifty four gigawatts or whatever running and that's the difference. And we saw I
don't know if you saw Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, we saw negative power
prices across Europe, et cetera, et cetera. And it can contrast that
with a year ago. Now, these are these crazy prices. So the
good news is the existing nuclear plants in Europe are back and running. Yeah,
but I mean people are cheering about back to normal. Well, for
me, it's a niche market technology, and it's an important niche market technology
in the electricity space. But it's not going to change our world going forward.
I don't think it is. Anyway, you never know, it might
be surprised. No, no, no, but it's just too expensive.
It's too expensive it's just takes too long. It takes too long, and
the private sick dog doesn't want to touch it. So it's just public money.
And as you know, public money is a finite resource. Sure is.
Yeah, absolutely, As we talk about niche market technologies, can we
talk about offshore end? Okay? So two twenty three there were a lot
of host is, especially in the US, with probably what half of the
project were mouth bold or just canceled. Osted caused them a fortune. I
don't know what price they negotiated with New Jersey because every developer has managed to
get out with a few millions, but Osted had to pay billions to get
out of the New Jersey deals. Absolutely. Absolutely. The reasons are known
inflation, supply chain, interest rates and so on. But I think there
are silver linings and I do believe that this industry is going to turn around
into twenty four and I give you a few reasons. Number one, w
at the end of last year they bought all of that t and Fal off
shore development in the North Sea for a billion, which means that is still
very bullish on off shot wind. Osted has announced that they're going to develop
on CEA three, which is an absolute massive wind farm. Same in the
North Sea, and I guess they founded deal with the UK regulator to get
a better price because their price was really too low. And even in the
US we just had last week Avant Grid and Copenhagen in Fosture Partner announced that
they're eight hundred mega what Vineyard win number one as fed power to the New
England grid. So despite all the bad headlines, people are working. This
is a hard working industry and they still continue to plant those stourbines in the
sea. So that's great. So let me give you my upsote opinion.
Please, offshore wind, I think is a niche market technology and it will
stay that way. And I'll start with one question. Do you know how
much offshore wind turbines were installed across the world excluding China last year twenty twenty
three? Nope, but you're gonna tell me four gigabats? Why are we
talking about the technologies focus? Sorry, we did four hundred gigawats worth the
solar last year and we're talking about four gigawatts, so not the words were
installing more solar in four days than offshore one does in a year. Let
me give you my theory why it is. It is because it started with
the European project, which was to connect Europe together to the North Sea.
Oh yeah, we'll have an island here, we'll do this, we'll connect,
we'll interconnect the countries in And there's another advantage really clear. The North
Sea is not deep. So if you look at the projects that we're done
in the UK where they're really offshore, they're almost on shore right in the
initial ones have done. If I look at a lot of the stuff going
forward, Baltic Sea, et cetera, et cetera, the water's not deep.
So I can get my head around that, and I say, okay,
that makes sense. But before giga, what's a year? And by
the way, okay, you know, if I include in China and that
we're at ten gigawatts, the whole onshore wind market is eighty ninety gigawatts a
year. All the attention goes to offshore and we talk about floating, we
talk about this, and we talk about that. And if I look at
the US, let me be really radical in that, why should the US
build one gigawat of offshore wind? They've got the best resources in terms of
fossil fuels, and every former renewables. You can imagine whether it's hydro on
show wind, so they have all of it, why should they go and
put the money into this big expensive one. Now I can understand you might
say New England. You gave that example earlier. Niche market. It's a
little island normal within the within the system. I kept my head around there,
so I just see offshow wind staying niche market going forward. And to
be honest, I don't want to talk about offshore wind this year because it's
not important four gigawatts when we're doing five hundred, six hundred gigawats of renewables
every year. Four gigawatts in the portant, I hear you. But those
four gigawatts, they're gonna produce power at the very high load during the months
where we need the power the most. And it's great. You're gonna put
sell up panel and probably we can run on sell up Let's battery five to
six months per year. That I agree, But what happened the other six
months. You're very happy to have those off show wind farm. We're gonna
deliver the quasi base load between October to March, so it's a good compliment
to solar, and it's not an opponent to solar, but I would say
you need on show wind rather off show wind. Unshow wind is easier every
way, it's cheaper to when installed, there's less risks. Yes, you
might say the capacity factors are lower, but it depends where you are.
You know, you go to the midwestern United States, capacity factors are the
same as well as if you're in the North State. Yeah, yeah,
yeah, and then you need to cross ten or fifteen New es States and
it's just impossible, a much easier let's cross the Atlantic. We'll talk about
it on the next podcast. So so we just talk about two niche today.
But I like of show wind. You know, it's beautiful, and
of course you like it because you're a project finance guyrol on and it's a
project finance is called. It's a big project. It's five hundred megawatts,
it's one point five billion, you know, as opposed to Minuttle five A
lot of my solo on my rooftopic. Why not like that? That's too
poorant that's too difficult to finance. I think we need to be very open
minded when it comes to clean energy. So, and I agree with Chick.
I agree with check a great check a great chat. I understand if
you're in the US and you have gas at less than three dollars and BTU
the amount of premium that you need to add on the top of this to
finance of show win, maybe it's too much. But in Europe we are
energy poor and you can get throwing the fifty percent of the years at double
digit. You know, I take it fair enough, fair enough, And
as I said, I'm not completely knocking off showing. I just it seems
to grab so many headlines when actually I look at it and say, well,
it's a niche market, okay before we go, And I know you
don't want to do like the news this stuff, but I'm going to do
it. Nevertheless, there's a company we add on the show, I think
like four years ago when we started, and we just drunk their propaganda and
kol Ad that's comings you know. They were telling us, oh, we're
so clean, you know, a New Engines and they've been fined one point
six billion dollars. And of course when you have such a bad news,
they managed to put the press release the day before Christmas, so in fact
nobody talked about it. I divested it completely. Really, who find them?
Who find them? Comings? They use the same you know, software
cheating design as Volkswagen. Oh my god. It is the second biggest fine
ever of this story after Volkswagen. And they've been cheating on all the this
engine for like ten years. And it's not an allegation. They admitted it.
They took the fine and it's okay, we're gonna publish the Friday before
Christmas. Oh my god. All right, Okay, six hundred and thirty
thousand Ram pickup truck engines, the largest ever penalty for a cleanar violation.
So I want to talk about it. You got it? You got it?
I like it. Okay, that's it. Okay, job my friend.
Well, I hope our listener enjoyed the new ish format, Got my
Friend. Next Monday, we'll have an episode on infrastructure investment, and we
continue that format in two weeks, so now it's going to be every Monday.
I look forward to chairs