Hosts: Gerard Reid & Laurent Segalen
Guest: Seyed Madaeni | Chief Digital Officer | Fluence
Category: ⚡ Energy
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[3:00] “Fluence has been well known for an ecosystem of deploying energy storage systems, services, and digital software. And the business that I'm leading, which is called Fluence Digital, is all about the software, and how can software help to transform the way we power our world?”
[3:34] “Renewables introduce a lot of variability and uncertainty in the way we operate power markets and electric grids. And to stabilize that you need hardware like energy storage systems that can be charged and absorb the abundance of renewable energy and give it back to the grid at the right time. But to make that happen, you need advanced software. This is not an asset that you can operate manually. It's a digital asset for the specific objectives that you're pursuing. It could be renewable integration, it could be revenue maximization, it could be transmission and distribution deferral relief. But in a nutshell, […] while storage can do a lot, it won't allow us to achieve our goals without pairing it with the right software. Because at the end of the day, the software is the brains behind this asset and it's making the right decisions for the objectives that we have, which ultimately is a cleaner society.”
[4:55] “When it comes to software as it relates to energy storage, there's two classes of applications. One is that we call it more of an edge control. And that is how do you make the energy storage system operate? How do you think about the pods and cells and different components within an energy storage system? How do you control these elements to get the right dispatch? For example, that piece of software, we call it the operating system, very similar to an operating system of a personal PC or laptop. Obviously, the data that goes into that, it's more to do with certain elements and components that are within an energy storage system, like cell health and degradation and the inverter status, etc.”
[5:43] “But then if I want to look at it holistically, then you have cloud based solution software, which is not necessarily going into the pods and cells of an energy storage system, but it's thinking about the outside world. How do I operate the energy storage system? How do I know how many megawatts am I going to buy or sell? How do I know if I want to use it for energy, or other reliability products […]. That outside layer, as you're thinking about the universe, as you're thinking about how to utilize the energy storage system, the data that goes into that is a bit different. You need information about wholesale markets, you [need] information about macro economic trends, you need information about the physical status of your energy storage system. It's a very different universe. And that's why to make this software story successful, you need both elements, both an operating system and a cloud system that can think about how do I utilize the energy asset.”
[20:57] “When it comes to energy storage, although it's a cool digital technology, the reason there's a lot of tailwinds for its growth is because of the needs. To cut carbon emissions, you need more and more renewable generation. But then when you look at that, fundamentally, they're variable and uncertain. […] And the right medium to bring that stability and bring that certainty in power grids, while evading emissions is energy storage. […] And the demand is picking up very, very strongly. More and more customers are adopting energy storage in different parts of the world, which didn't even exist previously. We're opening markets in APAC, we're opening markets in India, in Europe, in Australia, in the US […]. We're still in very early stages of the adoption curve.”
Rating: ⚡⚡⚡
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify | Google
🕰️ 28 min | 🗓️ 03/16/2022
✅ Time saved: 26 min