You're listening to Redefining Energy. Your co hosts from Berlin, Gerard Raid and
from London Lawrence Sagalam. Today on Redefining Energy, we're going to talk about
optimizing solar fleets. And what is great is we're not going to have a
white old dudes as usual. We're going to have a young and intelligent woman.
And we need more women on the show. So if you have any
great women, please let us know. But first let's talk a bit about
our special partner for the episode. And our partner is a company we have
invested in called feb Febesol is one of the fastest growing solar company in Germany.
Febol delivers residential pvcy stems with outstanding quality and also batteries, IV charging
and heat bumps. They're on what's amazing about this company, that's with the
culture because when we met them firstly it was how many people? Ten people?
What are they now twenty? I mean to do that in such a
short period of time and keep the quality up, it's all to do with
the cultural business and that's down to leadership and they've been really really focused on
that and it's pretty amazing. Yeah, let's talk about our guests at the
ARA. Atle is head of Global business operation at LIGHTSOURCEVP, where she has
worked for the past nine years. And actually, the funny thing is it's
great to have her on the show because when I set up Alexa Capital ten
years ago, our first client was light Source, right, and it's amazing
to see what light Source has done over the last decade. It really is
incredible the growth of this company, you know, and it's the largest developer
in your hab the third largest in the world outside China. Think about it.
They operate three hundred installations in nineteen countries. It's portfolio of almost nine
gigawa and they plan to reach twenty five gigs into a twenty five. But
that brings a lot of questions because with such a diverse fleet from size to
geography, is how do you manage and optimize all those assets? And the
answer is not very easily. That's why we brought Aden on the show,
is to try to understand how she managed to optimize such a global fleet.
Speaking on the show, Welcome to the show, Good morning, Thank you
very much for having me Adele. You've been nine years at Lightsos VP,
and I guess the company has changed a lot and your role has changed a
lot. So how I've been your first nine years? My first nine years
have been our roller coaster as much as the solar industry has been so.
I started in lyse Pp in twenty fourteen. At the time it was still
Lightser's only two one hundred employees and a company very much focused on the UK
market. Through the course of the past nine years, the company has reached
now one thousand employees and we are operating in nineteen different country. We are
still very much a solar focused developer, so there is our technology and we
are still very much applying the same approach to different markets. But of course
the complexity of operating in such a geographically dispersed environment and with a thousand people
you know, co easibly working towards our purpose of bringing solar to this word
has brought quite a number of different challenges that we are happily facing every day.
My role specifically has changed from being the leader of the asset management team
that looks after the operation technically, commercially and financially of our sites to today
leading our global business operation which EBBS very much responsible for delivering our business transformation
and digitalization strategy. So I'm kind of at the core of our ways of
working during this changing and growth pattern. Can I ask, just as you
talk about business transformation, I mean, you've been doing this since the business
is set up, right, So as an analysts sort of looking in and
the industry, there's a lot of solar companies that have failed along the way
and at that have succeeded, including light Source. Of course, you know,
I ask the question, what's the secret source? Because you to succeed.
I think it's very much down to our DNA. We are very truth
to ourselves, and our leadership has always been very clear around what lisers and
lisus VP now is about. We have a very clear and simple purpose and
a very clear set of values that actually have been determined by asking the employees
to determine what our company venues were. So I think we have a community
of people that is very much pointing in the same North style direction. What
is interesting though, is that we haven't never been dogmatic the how we get
there, the how we can adapt our ways of working, how we can
shift our operation to meet the requirement of a specific market or specific challenge.
Because underpin our ability of being successful in different markets and grower speed. Ultimately,
as an industry, we are very adaptable and that is one of the
key of success that has allowed us to be where we are today. Where
you are today, you have nine gigots asset on the operation and you tag
at twenty five in the next few years, So I mean really amazing growth.
And I see all the type of assets you have and five mayga what
somewhere in England and almost five hundred in Australia. So when you see all
those assets like different size all over the place, what would you say is
the same and what would you say is different? Managing all those countries and
different type of assets. The complexity of managing smaller and bigger side is really
in volume. So the main principle and the main approach is to work of
an asset manager for example, which is you know, my old self is
very much consistent and very similar. The level of diligence, the type of
processes that you need to deploy to make sure you're overseeing the technical performance of
aside appropriately, the type of contractoral arrangement and the dynamics with your subcontractors are
very very similar. Now the real complexity comes around how do you get control
of your at a point and how do you get control of the volume,
and how do you keep that diligence when the number of contract you manage is
multiplying. Part of it is training, because when you actually grow a team,
the fundamental aspect of that is how do you bring up new talent and
how do you walk with them through the journey of learning and being at the
level of professionality you require. And part of it is how you can leverage
technology to help you get control and get value out of the information that comes
from the site that can educate then your decisions as an asset manager. So
really, the principles and the risks surrounding a five megawab side or a five
hundred megawat sides tend to be substantially the same, more than the size.
What has been very interesting for us during the year is the complexity of your
interaction with the market. Moving from a market where you are generating your electricity
and your level your nine comes from subsidies is a very different operational proposition that
operating in a market where you have even a suitable merchant exposure, where you
have a ppa with a corporate that relies on your continuous generational energy for them
to be able to power their factories. Your mentality shifts a bit from being
just a generator that inject energy to the grid, to a service provider to
someone else's whether it's a market or whether it's a corporate. So more than
the size of the sites, the complexity of the market we're operating in is
the one that has driven some of the changes in mindset and some of the
changes in business operations processes that we have applied from an asset management and general
ownership perspective. Can I ask you a little bit about the JV that you
did with PPA, because I can say this is the old world meeting the
new world, but it's also big bureaucracy meeting innovative startup. How's that worked
out? Maybe a bit of history so that I can frame what happened when
we entered into the JV. Of course, Less was funded in twenty ten,
and when we completed the transaction with UP and entered into the Inventor it
was the end of twenty seventeen. So during those seven years we had already
started expanding slightly outside of the UK in a couple of different countries. I
suppose we were in a part of our journey where we felt that there was
more we could achieve, more, we could get more value we could generate
by deploying our ways of working in even multiple countries, and we needed a
partner to make sure that that was enabled. And there was the overall ethos
of the V. When you enter into the type of GV, the concern
or the question around what is going to happen to my day to day?
Am I going to receive impositions around how I have to work? Or expectation
around how my internal checking balances and bureaucracy should work. VP has been very,
very respectful of our culture. We have not been asked to fundamentally change
the way we work. We have not been asked to fundamentally increase our level
of bureaucracy or checking balances. They have helped us raise the bar on certain
aspects of corporate functions. Our ass in safety performance has improved very significantly.
We have mated that our compliance functions. There are a number of expectations they
set to us around what good would look like, but thee how to get
there has been very much down to us. Of course, we also had
the opportunity of having secconments between the two organization. So my boss is a
secondly from VP, our group chief operating officer, and I think that type
of cross contamination has been very helpful as well. The beauty of having a
partner like VP and having VP employees coming and working alongside us is having access
to an enormous amount of learning that can really help us further accelerate our growth
trajectory. We can avoid pitfalls that other companies have gone through ten years ago.
We don't need to reinvent the wheel. There are quite a lot of
interesting learning points we can take from them. So I think if you embrace
a GV of this type in this way, and if you have a partner
that actually allows you to decide how you go from A to B, it
can be a very very successful relationship. You talked about digital, and I
think now we all agree that the energy transition is also a digital revolution.
So how has digital change within the management of your operation in the past year?
So what is different? We have taken quite an interesting view on digital.
So, first of all, the role that I'm covering now was specifically
designed to lead our digital transformation. And our business transformation. When we had
that conversation at the end of twenty twenty, there was quite pioneering from our
executives. So our day to day is looking at the way we work and
see how we can deliver digital tools to improve people life. Our very first
focus was on why don't we look at the data that comes from our side
as an asset, as an additional source of value and how can we harvest
additional value out of the data. Of course, we're not a technology company,
so we don't have the pretense of going out and designing our own software.
But what we can do is actually investing in our data, making sure
that is store used for computing, curated and transformed by us according to our
own internal rules. We decide the math, we control it, and that
is a slightly different approach that we have taken from very many other suppliers.
So we use a number of technology providers, but our data sets in our
own data lake. We do not accept black boxes that we have no control
upon in so far our data is concern. We use black boxes to be
able to do some extraction and automated calculation of KPIs one of the things that
we have done for our operating team as been allowing them to use advanced analytic
systems for them to accelerate both the normal reporting obligation and requirement, but also
accelerates their ability of doing site behavior and side performance comparison and understand the root
cause of underperformance as quickly as possible, minimizing the site visits. This allows
us to be faster in taking decision, but also to be fair, the
less you have to be on side, the less you have service spit engineer
in a car going and troubleshooting to site, The less you have risk of
vehicle accident, the less you have the risk of people working alone on a
side. So it actually has a cascade effect on quite a number of different
risk profiles across the organization. But actually what we have realized starting delivering this
type of products to the business is that there is quite a lot that we
can do for our engineering teams and our front and teams in development. So
the company has invested quite significantly in gis SO geographical and spatial systems so that
we can support our developer in identifying sites that are suitable for sort of development
with all of the potential restriction, much much quicker. What is very interesting
is after a while you realize that whilst all of these ways to extract value
from the data are amazing results, they are actually not the objective of a
business transformation or a digitalization journey. The real objective that you are achieving is
really fundamentally changing and shifting the employment experience of your colleagues. I have actually
stopped thinking my objective is giving a tool that can increase the availability of the
side, and I'm starting thinking that my objective as leader of this transformation is
fundamentally changing the way it feels for My calling to work for LISPP is having
the guys coming to the office and thinking I am in the twenty first century.
I'm not copy pasting in Excel anymore. I am doing something different.
I am doing something funkier. A computer is doing the hard work, and
I can actually deliver more value with my creativity, but it requires a lot
of investments on special skills, and they are very expensive skills. Because data
engineer, data scientists, data governance specialists can work for renewables, can work
for all and us can work for banks, can go for a variety of
different industries, and so they are very difficult to find and very difficult to
keep motivated and to keep working for us, and also requires a lot of
diligence from everyone across the organization because we are all used to download and fancy
up in our iPhone and sometimes we think that the apps and the systems we
within the office are the same thing, but actually the backbone, the data
structor the data organization behind it. Maintaining that, curating that continuously asking what
goods look like and applying the math to it requires a lot of effort,
a lot of time, and a lot of discipline, and the discipline for
a startuppy mentality company sometimes it's difficult to nail down. So where I'm seeing
digital going, can I ask you about the sort of optimization of the assets?
What do you do in that area? So there are a number of
different things that you can do. Optimization might be both acceleration in resolving a
specific problem. You have a failure, you understand quicker what that failures is
caused by, and the device a plan for fixing that particular problem faster.
You optimize your response, understanding and resolution time fundamentally, so you increase your
uptime. The other element of it is actually started looking at the sites not
in a vacuum and in a silos, but in comparison mode, so you
can actually try to see which sites are performing very well and why, and
then you can try to bring other size that they have similar characteristic up the
curve. You can start comparing the performance in different technology, in different environments,
on in different type of design of the sites and see in which type
of environmental condition and which type of design a certain component and it works better
than others. And then this educates your next procurement strategy or your next development
design of a site. All of that is instead of reserving an issue,
preempting potentialation to happening, and try to ensure that you actually start your base
case from an even higher position than what you had before. We always talk
about optimization though without realizing that optimization is just the tip of the iceberg is
what generally people can see outside of the water, but the large majority of
the work that assets services team do on the ground and back in the offices
if they are on the asset manager on monitoring side of things, just to
reach your base case, which is the water level of the iceberg. Is
a mountain, is a huge amount of work that generally get not seen or
appreciated. So fundamentally, we have as an industry grew up with this myth
that as long as you stick the panels to the ground, the fun is
shining and the base case just happens. I'm always asked what optimization means and
what we can do to optimize, And there are a number of other examples
that I can give you on how we are optimizing, how often or how
quickly we clean panels, whether we clean or we clean knot panels, for
instance. But really what for me as a digital provider is more important is
how do I make the day to day of the guys that are actually working
to make sure that the base case is realized better? How do I help
them make that experience more enjoyable, Because then the optimization is the funky part
of the job, but it's very very small if compared to the overall efforts
that an asset management and one MPT needs to put on the ground. You
are in continentally hope you're in Brazil, You're in Texas or in Australia.
The digital part here in relation to grids, which are extremely different. What
would you see your role would be in relation to Okay, the assets look
the same, but they're outside environment is very different, So how do you
manage that? This question is actually very interesting because you think about the gride,
which is an external counterpart. We have to deal with an important stakeholder.
But actually you will find that even if you're working on internal, inward
looking ways of working, there might be fundamental differences sometimes between how a certain
business processes run in the UK, or in Brazil or in Australia. So
even if you look inward for tools that are just supporting the day to day
operation of the teams, you actually find yourself in having to design an architect
it solutions that do support a degree of variety on the grid integration side of
things or the market interaction side of things. Lovely that you mentioned Texas because
the market there is rather complex. The way the data scientists work when they
operationalize a product is very much around starting from one market, testing making sure
that it works, and then they tackle the second market. They understand why
this is the minimum standard common denominator that they can deploy, and then that
minimum standard is the one that they deploy globally, and then you have to
go and understand exactly the mechanics and the markets for each and every one of
the market you operate with, and see how you have to flex an up
on top to make sure that you are reflecting specifically the requirement of that market
or that particularity is or the particular grid. What's white fascinating about the way
they work is that progressively they tend to expand the minimum common denominator as much
as they possibly can, so that when you have a new digital product,
you make sure that that digital product is applicable as widely as possible. This
requires actually quite a substantial understanding of what are the market regulation like, what
are the dynamic of the market, what are technical requirement of every grade operator?
And while it is challenging, I think is also the most interesting part
of the job for a data scientist because it is when they are really sitting
with the BIS, with the frontline users on a day to day basis to
understand a job and make the sure that that job is correctly reflecting in the
digital tool. There is no civil bullet to have one tool that covers everything,
but the silver bullet is how do you work with your frontline We are
always used to imagine the IT and data people sitting in a dark room coding
their life away day in day out, And actually I put the leg about
it. Every day they love to work all nighters for some reason. They
sleep in the morning and work overnight, a very interesting pattern. But actually
the strength of a digital transformation is when the coders and the scientists are sitting
with the frontline business because they need to be able to understand what the markets
requirements are. They need to understand what it is that it is the daily
experience of working of their colleagues to be able to put them in a digital
tool. And this is very interesting because us require a shift of skills on
people on the front line too, because they need to learn how to make
very simple, very complex concept, how to explain their work in a very
very simple way so that it can be synthetized in a digital tool. I
jell you can I ask you to talk a little bit about the future,
because when I'm coming from and all of this is we've got artificial intelligence coming
at us left, right in center, and you're at the forefront. So
how do you see it and how does it impact your business? And renewables
going forward. How do I see the future. I always say that the
purpose of my team is to future prove our operation. I don't see a
fundamental difference between today and the future in the sense that what I have learned
by working with digital specialists is that the future is just yet another ititeration of
the presence. The way they work is very much around trial and error,
trial and keep on going. And so what I find it very interesting is
then it becomes a continuum. You don't really have a breakthrough. You keep
going. It might be a breakthrough for people that are not in the day
to day. What I'm thinking about when I think about the future is a
continuous evolution. Is more, is faster, is deeper reach. The way
I am envisaging our organization to work is an organization where we've really breakdown silos
and I'm really hoping that the thing that Renewable will be able to do,
and renewable companies because they tend to be quite entrepreneurial and not young from an
agraphic perspective, but from a mentality perspective, is bringing in a bit more
diversity and keep on right rating and keep on adapting and keep on learning.
We are going to have to answer ethical questions around our use of digital tools.
We're going to have to answer an ethical question around what do we use
this tool for. Let alone the cybersecurity part of it, which I'm not
even touching upon, but that type of security will actually be a very,
very very important future skills for us to build as an industry, both for
the security of our operating sites but also for the security of our own empoy
and our companies. But fundamentally, the ethical questions will be around how do
we make sure that we embed this technology still respecting the individual talent and capability
of the people we have, and still making sure that we have opportunity to
expand our organization, get new talent in, and get new people to work.
So I'm forcing my kids to do coding training, not because I think
they're going to become coders in the future, but because it's going to become
second nature. The way today we use Excel in three days sign is going
to be the way we use power bi. At the beginning of this year,
we did an entire roadshow to teach more than three hundred of our college
how to use powerbi, out of which the Powerbi becomes the new Excel and
in two years time it's going to be the next evolution of visual tools.
It's really about making sure that we prepare people with the right skills because these
iteration is not going to stop, and the right skill of both from a
user side but also from an understanding of what is behind the cold. So
I'm thinking that we will have to relearn some skills as leaders to speak the
same language of new talent that is coming into the organizations. We will have
to become very very well versed on what cybersecurity means, because we cannot be
such an important integral part of the generation of electricity in any country we operate
and not taking the security and the protection of our infrastructure extremely seriously, and
that requires a very high level of specialism and sophistication. Learning these new skills
will become more more important. I don't think we will be able to look
at people's CV without also asking ourselves or asking them how much data literacy is
part of their experience, what type of digital skills they have. This will
definitely be part of our future, but ultimately we are still in a position
where technology can help us do our well work better as opposed to take jobs
away, and we absolutely need to embrace that because there is no way back.
Well, Adele, it's a wonderful way to conclude our conversation. Very
hopeful, very thoughtful as well. Oh I love us, I love us.
I think it's a great way and really brilliantient and I especially love the
fact that you're getting your kids to code. How old are they may ask?
So my eldest is about to turn thirteen and my youngest is then,
and it's wonderful. Yesterday, for the first time, I couldn't make my
outpad work, and my son managed to fix it for me. So there
you go. I have in house it support excellent. Thank you very much
for coming and I wish you the best and light SOURSEVP as well, thank
you very much for having me brilliant. Oh job, I'm so old.
I'm so old. Why Because she's teaching her kids programming languages and you can
barely use Excel. They are using a software I didn't even know existed.
That's pretty crazyness. Before we comment on what Ather is doing, generally speaking,
I would say BP has been very lucky or very smart because the way
they are managing their gvs seems to be in what I would call the goldilog
zone, which has allowed license BP to grow that fast. So they benefit
from teaming with a great, big energy company without having the downside of bureaucracy
and everything. Can I tell you a funny story. The story is that
another solo company which I won't name, but I remember calling up the CEO
after he'd been acquired by a particular oil company, and he said to me,
Jared, I'm really sorry, but I have to hang up the call
now. And I said, what I says? You called me? I
was just calling you back, and he broke out laughing. He says,
yeah, he says, that's the regulations in this oil company. He says,
I'm not allowed telephone in the car. I said, put your telephone.
He says, I'm using my private phone. And why I say that
is that, you know? He basically said to me listening, I'm not
going to stay here. The cultures ridiculous. And then I called Nick Boyle,
who's the CEO of Light Source, and I said, so, Nick,
how's it gone? And he said amazing? He said, really,
Jared win win situation. He says, these guys are allowing me the freedom
to succeed. But are they're giving me what I need, which is the
balance sheet, which is their access to industrial customers and an and and I
thought brilliant. So BP have done a great job with light Source. They
really have, you know. So when I really listened to our conversation while
I was editing, there are a few points which are absolutely remarkable, and
we can discuss a bit about them. She said, investing in our data
is investing in our people. It's a very very interesting statement. You're absolutely
right. I'm thank you for bringing that back to me, because what she
was saying was people get bored, right, and we need to keep them
interested. Especially I've got a whole pile of people who are sitting at a
desk all day. If they're doing the same task again and again and again,
it's pretty monotonous, and you get bored, you move on. That's
what I took out of it. What did you take out of it?
She said, There's another quote which I found remarkable. The future is just
another iteration of the present. Yeah, and again it's coming from her digital
view of the world. It's lovely. It's lovely my overall conclusion, And
of course we were wondering what was the secret source of the success of such
organization. The secret source is a humanity. Very good. I would just
use a different word. I'd actually use it's a growth culture within that business.
And she did talk about that and how it's not a top down thing.
This is a thing that came from the team itself, and I thought
that's really, really, really really interesting. Right, Okay, Chad,
We really thank Adele for coming onto the show. We thank Phoebe sl for
being partner of this episode, and I took to you in two Weekstein look
forward to it. Thank you for listening to Redefining Energy. Don't forget to
rate the show and subscribe on Apple, Podcast, Spotify, or the platform
of your choice.