Malcolm Turnbull: Clean Energy Culture Wars and The Race To Build More Storage | Ep 222

Malcolm Turnbull

99% of Australians either have solar panels on their roof or know somebody who does. And so to say to an Australian, ‘oh, that renewable energy is terrible and puts your costs up.’ They're going to say, ‘No, no, it doesn't. Actually it brings my bill down.’ Or ‘my mate Fred never stops boring me witless about how much money he's saving.’ We're now in a situation where renewables are cheaper. If you have to build a new power plant from scratch, there is no question what you're going to do in Australia, and it absolutely isn't a coal fired power station. 

Michael Liebreich 

I remember saying that in 2012 and there was outrage. Apparently it dominated the newswires for three days that Bloomberg NEF said that renewables were cheaper than coal, and it was practically a constitutional crisis. 

ML  

Hello, I'm Michael Liebriech, and this is Cleaning Up. Welcome to Season 16. Before we get started, I would just like to welcome two new members to the leadership circle. That's Cygnum Capital, an investment bank and asset manager focusing on Africa, and Arup, the global design, engineering and planning consultancy. To kick the season off, our guest today is a former lawyer, statesman, climate champion and energy investor. He's also the second former Australian Prime Minister to appear on the show. Please welcome the Right Honorable Malcolm Turnbull to Cleaning Up. 

ML

Malcolm, thank you so much for joining us here on Cleaning Up. 

MT

Great to be with you, Michael. 

ML

Now it's been, I've calculated, just under four years since we met. It was actually during COP21 in Glasgow. 

MT

In a castle outside Glasgow. 

ML

In a castle which I rented just outside Glasgow. And we'll get onto that. But what we should do is… 

MT

It wasn't the McLiebriech ancestral castle then?

ML  

Sadly no, the McLiebriech’s that's a bit of a figment. They're more from the sort of the shtetl end of ancestry.

MT

So more in Dracula country? 

ML

That direction, not quite, but that direction. What we should do before we dive in, though, is many of our, I think, audience, they will know roughly who you are, but they might not know too much, and I apologize on their behalf, but can we start where we always start? Just who are you and what do you do in your own words?

MT  

Well, I'm Malcolm Turnbull. I'm resident of Sydney, citizen of Australia, best known for being Prime Minister of Australia for three years from 2015 to 2018. I've always had a very keen interest in grappling with the global warming challenge and the fascinating, exciting transition of energy from continuous thermal generation to renewables. And so that was a big part of my political career. It caused me to have quite a few dramas — good and bad, ups and downs — because the lunatic… I shouldn’t call them lunatics, but the right wing have turned the energy issue into a culture war issue in Australia, just as they have in the United States. But so I did quite a lot in the energy sector area when I was in politics, and now I'm back in the private sector. I have a renewable energy development company called Turnbull Renewables, and we have a small team, very smart, young team, and we're developing a number of renewable energy projects, two pumped hydros, which we recently sold to AGL. We're still managing the development with them, and still involved financially. A big wind farm, working on a big battery, that sort of thing.

ML  

It's always fascinating to see how people answer that question. There's a lot there. So you've got your statesman role. You did a bit of politics in that answer. Then energy, the centrality of energy in your career, in your life, climate. And then you touched on what you're doing now, which is these energy developments? That's a pretty good guide for what we talk about. 

MT  

Yeah. I guess the other thing I'd say is I've been a sort of serial venture capitalist, started a lot of businesses, co-founded a lot, and I'm still doing a lot of VC. And I should add that I've done pretty much all of these things in partnership with my wife, Lucy, who I've been married to for over 45 years now. And you know, including the famous/notorious, depending on your point of view, Spycatcher trial back in 1986 which I guess, is where we became well known in the UK.

ML 

And that was your career as a lawyer? And Lucy was a former mayor?

MT  

Well, she was mayor of Sydney, Lord Mayor of the city, then, more recently, Chief Commissioner of the Greater Sydney Commission. But she actually, Lucy's a lawyer, very top notch lawyer, and played the key part in the Spycatcher trial. It was basically me and Lucy were the legal team, or the bulk of it.

ML  

And what we'll do is we'll put a link into the show notes for anybody who wants to know what the Spycatcher trial was. It was a very bizarre attempt to ban a book which was freely available in much of the world. So I remember it. I didn't know your role until I started to scratch around looking to research for this episode. Let's start with that statesman piece, if you like. And in fact, not so much the past history. Tony Abbott was a guest on the show, episode 52, so if anybody wants to go down that rabbit hole again, they'll be able to do that. That's what the internet and ChatGPT is for. But I want to know what you think of the current state of the world. You've touched on it already, about the sort of the extreme right, though you call it the lunatic fringe, and what they're doing. But the state of the world more generally encompasses more than just climate policy. We've got these tariffs, we've got the great power rivalry, which has really come to the fore. Where are we?

MT  

We're in a very disrupted environment. The biggest single disruption, not the only one, is Donald Trump. His America is very different from the America we've been used to. You can't really say that Trump shares the same values as we in countries like Australia and the UK have shared with the United States for many years, perhaps ever since the Second World War. And core to those values is a commitment to the rule of law and ensuring that the strong cannot do whatever they like to the weak. That's what the United Nations was founded to protect. That's what America has always said it's there to defend. You know, the cause of freedom is America's cause, wherever in the world. And every president really has said that in one form or another since the Second World War. But Trump quite clearly believes and he says, that might is right. So might is right. And he makes no bones about that. And he doesn't care about whether countries are democratically run or whatever. I mean, look, he rolled out, literally rolled out, the red carpet for Vladimir Putin the other day. This is a guy who runs an authoritarian state in Russia, and who has, of course, invaded Ukraine and killed thousands and thousands of Ukrainians in this terrible war, which is a criminal exercise. But you know, Trump, of course, when Putin invaded Ukraine three years ago now, Trump described it as a genius move, because he thought he was going to win. So you see, Donald is a really transactional guy. He believes in strength. He believes in leverage. Look at that discussion he had with Zelensky in the Oval Office. It looked like it came out of a movie. ‘You don't have any cards. You haven't got any cards.’ I mean, what gangster movie did that come out of? It all sounds so different from what we've dealt with before.

ML  

Can I ask, is it entirely wrong? I'm not going to endorse pretty much anything that I see. But I'm going to ask you is he entirely wrong? Is this just a wrong headed departure from the norm and from the kind of the arc of where you'd like to see history going, or is there some justification in his positions?

MT  

Well, Trump is not wrong about everything, and it's because a lot of people are affronted by Trump, and I've dealt with him directly. I know the guy. I dealt successfully with him, and not by sucking up. I might add. But a lot of what he says makes sense. I mean, look at European defense. Donald Tusk, very smart guy, currently Prime Minister of Poland, summed it up perfectly. Why do 500 million Europeans need 350 million Americans to protect them against 140 million Russians? And the answer is because the Europeans have not taken responsibility for their own defense, particularly the Germans, and they have not got their act together. They have not managed to get over the problems of collective action. So they've not got the capacity to defend themselves. And when Trump says ‘you guys should do it,’ that's a fair point. Now, of course, it's the timing and transition and how it happens. You certainly don't want to be rewarding Putin for this. But I think a lot of what Trump says makes sense. I mean, his campaign for deregulation makes sense. You've got people on the left saying that. I mean, Ezra Klein's book ‘Abundance,’ which everybody has to read and will have to memorize shortly, it's become so fashionable. But he's writing from the left and makes the point that one of the biggest obstacles to, for example, the roll out of renewable energy, and that's as true in Australia as it is in America, is unnecessary environmental environmental regulation and nimbyism. And so again, not everything Trump says is wrong, but where he is wrong is in basically walking away from 80 years of America championing the rule of law. And Trump clearly does not believe — I mean, people say he doesn't believe in the rule of law very much inside America, but he clearly doesn't take international agreements seriously. I mean, the tariffs he imposed on Australia and many other countries are in breach of trade agreements, etc. Look at the threats against Canada, the threats against Denmark over Greenland. This is a very different, very, very different American president.

ML  

But is there an argument that that is just America deciding not to put up with being trammeled in the international sphere? If you go back to Daniel Patrick Moynihan  who wrote ‘America in Opposition,’ I think that was during the last century. It was more than 25 years ago, about how the UN is essentially a sort of Fabian left wing plot by countries that want to trammel the US. They just want to use the platform of the UN to create impediments to the US projecting its power. So is this just the point where America says, — well, it has said it in many small ways in the past, the International Court and so on — but isn't this just the US saying openly what actually its policy has been for the last 30 years anyway?

MT  

Yeah, well, Trump exploits, as do populists everywhere, grievance, a sense of grievance. Grievance. You know, Make America Great Again, America First, they are all messages to say, we have been done down. We've been taken advantage of. We've been ripped off. And so this, we've got to stop. We've got to make countries pay. Trump believes we should have to pay to trade with the United States. So his idea of a trade deal is that the other country — UK, Australia — whatever, pays a tariff. But America doesn't have to pay any tariffs to export to that country. And this is just using your power to extract the best deal. And this is the might is right, strong do as they will. Look, the United States is the wealthiest, strongest economy in the world. It's got a lot of weaknesses, of course, but the idea that America has been badly done by the rest of the world, or ripped off by the rest of the world, is ridiculous. Frankly, it's been a huge beneficiary of globalization. Look at all the digital services that we consume globally. They're almost all American. I mean, it's a few exceptions, like Tiktok, but they're almost all American. So America has prospered mightily from globalization, and it's been the leading proponent of it, but it has now become the leading proponent of protectionism. And I don't think that it will benefit the US. Quite the contrary, most economists would agree with me. But in a sense, that's an issue, Michael, for the Americans. What we have to do in the middle powers, like the UK or Australia, what we've got to do is work out how we're going to deal with this ‘might is right’ world. And so we've got to work together. We've got to take more responsibility. We've got to do more deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership. We've got to band together and get out of our mindset that the United States is going to be the leader. We're not being anti-American saying this. Quite the contrary. The US is not an exhausted Atlas that can no longer carry the burdens of the world. The United States is stepping back from global leadership. And you know, I've had direct experiences. I mentioned the Trans Pacific Partnership, that was an Obama-era initiative, you know, a very ambitious free trade deal, lots of good environmental standards in it, and so forth. When Trump pulled out of that in 2017, everyone thought it was dead, universally thought it was dead. I didn't think it was dead, and neither did John Key, PM of New Zealand at the time. And then I took it on myself to persuade Shinzo Abe that we should keep going with it. It took a bit of persuading, but finally we had dinner at our house in Sydney. We won him over, and then Shinzo and I set out on persuading the remaining 11 members to keep going with it. And we did. And you know, the now-called CPTPP, it lives. The UK is joining it. Other countries will too. But what everyone had to get over was the idea that in the absence of American leadership, you couldn't do anything.

ML  

So I'm having a, I don't know if it's a full circle moment, but the last former Australian pm that I spoke to about CPTPP was I'm not sure if I can call him your nemesis. Tony Abbott. Well. 

MT

He might call me that.

ML

I was trying to work it out, I think it's somewhat mutual. It's been almost a sort of a death embrace of some sort. But because I was on the Board of Trade at the point where we were pushing and aligning, getting our ducks in a row to negotiate and getting what ended up with the accession to CPTPP. And Tony behind the scenes and on the Board of Trade was a huge driver of that.

MT  

Sure, I'm sure he would be. I never had any issues with Tony about trade.

ML  

He came on the show and we talked about trade, and there was a lot of agreement. When we got onto climate, it was a little bit stickier. 

MT

Well, he thinks global warming is a hoax. 

ML

He didn't say that on the show. He sort of said that he would like to deal with it. It just wasn't his top priority. But again, we'll put a link in the show notes for those in the audience who missed that. 

MT

Tony's on the record. He speaks for himself frequently.

ML  

Yes, but coming on to climate and relating it back to the US, I don't want to call it isolationism, the new isolationism of the US. Obviously, Trump has come out of the COP process, the UNFCCC process. A lot of people are heading off to Belem in Brazil in a few months. The US, I don't know if it'll be there at all, in an official position, is the COP process dead?

MT  

I don't know. Michael, you'd be better. What do you think? Do you think it is?

ML  

So I've got form on this, because I declared it dead after Copenhagen, I wrote a piece for Bloomberg called Ya Basta, which was the slogan of the Italian anti globalization movement. So I said, Ya Basta, can we stop doing this? Because at the time, and we're talking about that would have been about 

MT

2008.

ML

Well, COP in Copenhagen was in 2009. And then, I think it was 2010 they continued in Cancun, and then they went to, I think it was South Africa, and I just said, ‘Look, can we just stop?’ Because what was happening is, I was tracking all the activity and clean energy, the incredible growth of everything, and then you had this absurd, essentially failed process that was just year after year, banging this drum getting nowhere. And I felt it was actually undermining those who wanted to invest, those who wanted to commit their careers, their political capital, to clean energy. So I said, ‘Ya Basta.’ And of course, what happened is four years later, I think it was, the Paris Agreement. So I'm not prepared to declare it dead, but I do think I am calling for a reset. So in my recent writing, I'm saying ‘we need a climate reset.’ And one of the things we need to reset is the COP process, which is now pretty moribund, counterproductive in its current format.

MT  

Well, yeah, look, I'm not close enough to it any longer.

ML  

So you're not part of the campaign to get Australia to be the host of COP.

MT  

I'd welcome it, and I've spoken in support of it, but I'm not involved with the campaign. But when I attend COPs nowadays, I do so in my capacity as President of the International Hydropower Association. So I've really got more of an industry focus. I'm not dealing with the public policy of it at the national level any longer.

ML 

So we'll come on to the hydropower very shortly. But I do want to use the COP segue to link back to where you and I met in person the first time, which was during COP21. It was at that castle, the Blair Estate — nothing to do with Tony Blair — the Blair estate just outside Glasgow. And it was a hydrogen dinner, because at the time, you were working very closely with Andrew Forrest, another former guest on Cleaning Up, and you were banging the hydrogen drum quite strongly at that point. And I was already on — I don't think I'd named the hydrogen souffle ±but I was definitely calling the alarm or calling the caution. 

MT  

You were more of a skeptic, I think.

ML  

Well, I remember that evening, I did not realize at the time that the dinner was sponsored by Plug Power, and I called essentially, most of the use cases around transportation, I called them recreational uses of hydrogen, much to the consternation of their marketing person who was hovering in the background. But I was pretty skeptical already back then, in 2021.

MT  

Yeah, you were. Well, the story, I don't do non-executive directorships as a rule. You know, I'm a fairly substantial investor in my own right, my family's right, and we put our own money into our renewable energy portfolio and into our venture capital and other investments. So basically, just look after my own affairs, which is possibly better than going around annoying and interfering with other people's businesses. But Twiggy did ask me if I would provide some advice, and be a non-executive director of his new Fortescue Future Industries, which was the entity he had, and we set up the green hydrogen organization with Jonas Moberg. And I did that really, because I believe in the clean energy transition and I think you've got to give everything a shot. And I give Twiggy full marks for the energy and the passion and the money that he's put into it. But I stopped my role with Fortescue and green hydrogen came to an end at the beginning of last year. So I haven't really been involved with it for nearly two years now.

ML  

But you have continued to bang the drum for hydrogen. 

MT  

Well, I'm not against it, right? It's just that I don't like talking about — I'm always, you know, in my line of work, particularly in politics, you're always skating on this thin ice of talking about things you don't really know enough about. And hydrogen, I'm a bit out of date on. 

ML  

Right but at the Hydrogen Transition Summit at COP29 in Baku, ‘advancing hydrogen markets is central,’ your words ‘central to supporting the global transition towards a low carbon economy.’ There's a list. You've continued to say nice things about it in the face of this cratered landscape of failing hydrogen projects, even in Australia, which is probably the country that has tried hardest because of Twiggy and the government.

MT  

Yeah, and our huge radiation endowment. 

ML  

And if you can't make it work in Australia, there's a real question about where, other than maybe China or India…

MT

Saudi.

ML

But even Saudi, you know, NEOM, the big project in Saudi, costs have run over. The Air Products CEO, the company that signed the off-take, has been fired. So I mean that I would call that a pretty cratered landscape.

MT  

And you know much more about this than me. You're much more up to date than me. But you would say, I think, that the problem is, one of the biggest problems is the cost of energy has never gone down low enough to get to that $2 a kilo goal.

ML  

It's not just the cost of energy. I think people say, ‘look, hydrogen will get cheap, the same way solar got cheap, the same way that batteries got cheap,’ and so on. And the problem is that green hydrogen is made in a chemical plant, and we all know what they look like. Lots of chemical engineering and civils and so on. But also the feedstock is electricity. It's not something you just manufacture and it sits there providing its service. And so it's not just the energy cost, it's also the learning curve. It will actually be the learning curve of electricity, the learning curve of chemical engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering, and that goes right through the value chain. It's not just about production. You've got to store it. You've got to transport it. Twiggy made all sorts of statements about supplying his good friend, Anthony Bamford, JCB, with hydrogen from Australia, and I just sat there and said, how are you going to get it there? So it's the whole value chain, not just production. And I think $2 per kilo is just not going to happen.

MT  

Yeah, I've been satisfied myself that — and I think Japan was looking forward to shipping hydrogen to Japan — I think they're going to struggle with that too. I think it is very clear, because of the physical nature of the hydrogen molecule, and the difficulty of compressing it, transporting it, and so forth, that if you're making hydrogen, however you're making it, you should be using it very close to where you make it. So in other words, make it and then do something with it, whether you're making ammonia or something else, so you're not transporting at long distances.

ML 

So if Japan tries to use ammonia instead of because you can't ship hydrogen, you ship ammonia. If they try to use ammonia in their power system to generate power, their power costs will be increased by a factor of something around seven. Yeah. And so they can't possibly be in any way internationally competitive and prosperous.

MT  

Well, you know, you're probably right, Michael. But again, I give Andrew Forrest 10 out of 10 for having a go at it. I don't think he's given up on it, and I haven't given up on it, other than the sense that I'm not involved in it. So I don't really know enough.

ML  

I committed to myself that I'd give you a bit of a run around the paddock on hydrogen because of the length of time that you did spend on it. Talk to me about how you've ended up with hydro, because you're the president of the International Hydropower Association. But also there's this huge project, which anybody listening in Australia will know, Snowy 2.0. People around the world might not know it. How did that journey happen?

MT  

Well, I was Prime Minister of Australia in 2016 when there was a big blackout in South Australia, which in some parts of the state, went on for several days. And you know, the context was South Australia had closed down almost all of its continuous thermal generation, and it had a huge roll out of wind and solar, particularly wind. We had a renewable energy scheme, you know, the RET, the Renewable Energy Target, and it effectively subsidized renewables, but it didn't actually say where they could be, right? So you got the certificates if you developed a renewable energy project. And so a lot of them were developed in South Australia without anyone actually saying, ‘hey, how much can we stand here?’ And if we're going to have so much solar, so much wind and solar here, what are we going to do to back it up and for security? That wasn't nearly enough thought given to that. And so after that happened, there was a crazy political debate with people saying renewables are bad.

ML  

And so people blamed the wind, but there were pylons that came down, there was a storm.

MT  

That's true, but it was also the lack of, I mean, essentially their security blanket was a transmission, very skinny transmission, to the Victorian grid, which generated, in those days, most of its electricity by burning brown coal, which is the most carbon intensive form of thermal generation anyway. This got me thinking about it. And I did a lot of work and reading and talking to smarter people than me, and early in 2017 I said, ‘right, we have to make storage, long-duration storage, a priority.; And pumped hydro was the obvious solution. Then batteries were just arriving on the scene, and we one project that we got underway fairly soon after that was what is now known as Snowy Hydro 2.0 and that is a massive project. It's sui generis.

ML  

So this was a 2 billion AUD project.

MT  

It's not 2 billion. Of all the mistakes I've made in politics, this was the worst. Well not the worst, but this is the most annoying. So the project involves linking two dams, two huge dams in the snow mountains hydro systems, Lake Tantangara, which is the higher dam, and Lake Talbingo, which are about 20 kilometers apart and 700 meters difference in elevation. So clearly the problem is the connection, the tunneling and all that stuff that you've got to do. But that was the plan. It's actually an idea that had been worked on, and plans had been drawn up for it in the 1970s. So it wasn't exactly a new idea, but that's what we got going on, and that project got underway. In the very early days before there'd even been a feasibility done, or a new feasibility, I foolishly said to the Chief Executive of Snowy Hydro, ‘what do you reckon this will cost?’ And he said, ‘Oh, $2 billion,’ Now he had no idea what it would cost. I shouldn't have asked the question. He shouldn’t have answered it. And, you know, then people said It had an estimated cost of $2 billion. That was irrelevant, when the deal was done, the contracts were signed, the investment decision was made on a contract cost of $6 billion. So it has blown out, yes, but it's blown out from 6 to 12, not from 2 to 12.

ML  

Tracking it back it took about 6 months to go from 2 billion to 6 billion.

MT  

Yeah but it was never 2. It’s literally like, you've got a mate who's a builder, and you say, ‘I want to do this, this, this.’ He goes, it’lll cost you a million quid. And you go, ‘Oh, okay.’ And then you say to him, right can you do a proper quote, an estimate, and we'll get the architect involved. And it comes back, and it's 2 million quid, or 3 million quid, or whatever it is. That's the estimate, the quote effectively, that you make your decision on.

ML  

But there is some point at which that builder tells you a low-ball quote, possibly because he wants to get the job. 

MT

Yeah but he didn't want to get the job. He was the CEO, right? 

ML

But there has to come some point where you say, ‘Well, if we knew what we know now, we wouldn't have done it.’ Have we reached that point? Is $12 billion still a good deal for Australia.

MT  

Yeah, it is. The reason is that it is an enormous storage. It's got 350 gigawatt hours of storage. So the current power plant that's designed is 2.2 gigawatts. But it's the depth of storage that is enormous. So, you know, in our grid, which is dominated by solar, we need a lot of long-duration storage. Paul Simshauser, who I'm sure you're familiar with and would be a really good person to get on the show, I might add, he estimates we need another 16 gigawatt hours of long-duration, sorry… 16 gigawatts of capacity of long duration storage with an average duration of generate storage duration of around 18 hours. That's to firm the NEM. So we do need a lot of storage, and Snowy on a $1 per kilowatt hour basis is still a lot cheaper than the alternatives. 

ML

We have a rule on acronyms. I forgot to warn you about it, the NEM? 

MT

The NEM is the national electricity market in Australia, which covers all of Australia, except for Western Australia and the Northern Territory. 

ML

I apologize for interrupting. It so the audience can keep up. 

MT 

It’s OK, I hate acronyms, too, and I always forget what they mean. 

ML  

So the long duration storage, the analysis shows that you need it. The problem is that you need it relatively infrequently, correct? And particularly now that batteries have become so cheap and they eat all of the sort of short term demand, all of the daily and even a couple of days of fluctuations in that period where Snowy has at least doubled — maybe we'll take it from six to 12 rather than from the 2 billion starting point. But it's doubled in cost, and meanwhile, batteries have gone down by about 50% and so the challenge for something like Snowy is, actually, how often is it going to be used? And it has to then justify this enormous capital spend over very infrequent uses. So how do you finance it?

MT  

Well, it's being paid for by the federal government, of course. 

ML

So the taxpayer.

MT

Well, that's right, the cost is socialized. But Snowy 2.0 will make a lot of money, because having a storage of that duration enables you to write an enormous number of Caps, you know, all of the energy derivatives that basically form the energy market, the electricity market. If you're sitting there with that monstrous battery, you can write a lot of those because you have the ability to deliver physical power when you need it. So, it gives you enormous firepower. Nowadays, hydro generators make so much of their money that way. I can't tell you what the current percentage for Snowy Hydro is at the moment, but they make so much of their money just from the derivatives market.

ML  

But they send the bill to the federal government, or the government, which is the taxpayer, or to power users? They don't send the bill to the owners of the wind and the solar that are causing the volatility that they're dealing with. Is that a fair characterization?

MT  

Well, it's not a question of sending the bill. I mean, having a lot of storage gives you an enormous complement to renewables, because obviously it enables you to store… There are thousands and thousands of people in Australia that have solar panels on their roofs. Now over a third of all Australian houses have solar panels. And increasingly, they've got batteries. There’s s a big battery subsidy scheme at the moment, covers about 30% of the cost of a battery, 

ML

And it seems to be flying. 

MT

Flying. They've installed… It only began on the first of July. Now well over 750 megawatts of batteries have been rolled out. So it is flying, and so people understand it. But the point is, with the big storages, you're in a position where you can provide demand for wind and solar generation that would otherwise be curtailed. And this is one of the, you know, essentially it enables you to use your electricity in a more efficient way to time shift it from times of oversupply to times when the supply is insufficient.

ML  

Cleaning Up is supported by its Leadership Circle. The members are Actis, Alcazar Energy, Arup, Cygnum Capital, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP of Portugal, Eurelectric, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit cleaningup.live. If you've enjoyed this episode, please hit like, leave a comment, and also recommend it to friends, family, colleagues and absolutely everyone. To browse the archive of over 200 past episodes, and also to subscribe to our free newsletter, visit cleaningup.live.

ML  

I looked at something that Paul Simshauser wrote very recently, and he said that capturing that surplus, if you've got renewables — sometimes it's not there, and sometimes you've got surplus — capturing the surplus, he called axiomatic. And when I saw that, I was rather astonished, because to me, it's not axiomatic that we should use every kilowatt hour of wind and solar. We should solve problems whichever way is cheapest, and if it's cheapest just to spill some wind and solar to over develop, to have more wind and solar, because it is so cheap to develop but not try and use every kilowatt hour. Why is it axiomatic that we need to store it?

MT  

I don't want to get into an argument— Paul Simshauser is probably the best, the smartest energy economist I have ever met. And unlike a lot of energy economists, he's not just a theorist. He worked for AGL, a big generator and retailer in Australia, and he's just stepped down from the role, for some years, he's been running Power Link, which is the Queensland State Governments transmission utility. So he is someone that is not a theorist, and he's very, very knowledgeable, and he makes the case for… Paul's made a number of insights. And you know, his papers can be found at the Griffith University Center. I think it's called the Center for Applied Energy and Policy Research, something like that. But Paul makes a couple of points. One is he says we will need more long-duration storage than we thought, because the mix of primary generation in the renewable world is going to have a lot more solar in it relative to wind than we thought. Why is that? Because solar is cheaper, easier to roll out. Wind is, while the cost has come down, it hasn't come down by much relative to that. And of course, 200-meter wind turbines are very visible and people complain about them. So that means you need more long duration storage. The other point he's made, which is something that you know occurred to me for quite a few years, and I'm not a highly quantitative person, is that there's been a lazy assumption in energy market modeling in Australia that there is always going to be enough gas peakers to fill in the gap. It's what being old enough to remember Lotus 1-2-3, it's what I would call the backslash copy school of modeling, where you just assume you know a parameter indefinitely.

ML  

Malcolm I started modeling when it was called Supercalc. Not even Lotus 1-2-3, before Excel.

MT  

We’re competing antiquarians here. Anyway, Paul's demonstrated that not only are there issues about molecules, you know, enough gas on the east coast of Australia, but there's also the problem of the gas infrastructure. So you can always arguably find more molecules, but replacing gas pipelines, particularly for a fuel that you're hoping to transition out of, is very pricey. And the other point that he's made, and I think this is a really important thing, is that when people say, ‘Oh my gosh, trillions of dollars the cost of the clean energy transition,’ they overlook the fact that there's a lot of these thermal generators that have got to be replaced anyway. So, in Australia, for example, you say ‘oh my god, the cost of the solar and wind and the transmission, it's so expensive, that's terrible.’ You say, ‘Well, hang on. You know these old coal fired power stations, some of them are being basically held together with fencing wire.’ And they're getting very old, very unreliable. And in fact, one of our biggest problems now is the thermal plants breaking down. And so if you said, right, we're going to go with Donald Trump, and global warming doesn't matter. You know, coal rocks. If you're going to do that, you're going to have to build new coal fired power stations, and they don't come cheap. If I could just add to that, this is talking about gas now, yes, Snowy 2.0, which is a gigantic project, has doubled in cost. But you know what? So has Snowy Hydro’s gas peaker at Kurri Kurri in the Hunter Valley. And that's not that complex, you know? So supply chains, COVID, inflation, have done a lot of damage. And, you know, the final point I'd make, Michael about Snowy 2.0, much as I love it, is, it is sui generis. You know, there's no other project in Australia like it, and your typical pumped hydro project, and there's a lot of them being developed and/or built in Australia, involves putting a Turkey's nest dam on a ridge next to an existing reservoir. And that is a lot simpler. You're not talking about big TBMs (tunnel boring machines). You're talking about tunneling with drill and blast, and road headers. It's much simpler.

ML  

So we need to explain Turkey's nest for non Australians, and also TBM.

MT  

So what I mean is, a Turkey's nest is, and some of them are not necessarily Turkey's nest, but they're essentially, for a good example in this country, in the UK, is Cruachan in Scotland, built in the 60s, I think, where you just build a dam on top of a hill, which is obviously where dams normally rarely exist there naturally because of gravity. So you build a dam there. You either dig a hole and put a wall around it, which is the definition of a turkey's nest dam, or you just build a dam wall across a gully, as they did in Cruachan above Loch Awe. And you know, that is then several 100 meters above the lower reservoir. And it's the old story, you pump water to the upper reservoir, and electricity is cheap, and you run it downhill and generate power when electricity is in demand.

ML  

And the idea about the turkey's nest is it becomes much more independent of geography, and also it doesn't interrupt the flow of a river, correct?

MT  

And this is where Andrew Blakers, the Australian engineer’s work on the global pumped hydro Atlas comes in, and actually we commissioned the first part of that back in 2016, so it's been going a long time. There are literally thousands, tens of thousands sites for pumped hydro.

ML 

I think 800,000 is the number.

MT

Yeah, and it's being used particularly in India. You know, I've been to meetings in India where they'll use and of course, not all of them work, but it's essentially a good screen. And you know, what Andrew has been able to do is identify places where there are the opportunity to have relatively close, relatively adjacent reservoirs, that satisfactory difference in elevation that you can build, or maybe you only have to build one because you've got an existing lake or whatever. And, you know, bingo, you've got your pumped hydro project.

ML  

I'm going to be meeting Andrew, I believe, at the pumped hydro conference next week.

MT

He's fantastic. But I must say, very shy though. 

ML 

Well, that's going to be interesting, because if he's shy, and I'm skeptical.

MT 

Oh he'll handle you ok.

ML  

Okay, well, I'm happy if he does. 

MT  

He’s got the Queen Elizabeth medal for engineering, for his work on solar.

ML  

Yeah, he worked with Martin Green, another fantastic Australian scientist. But on solar, I tell you why I'm skeptical, because—

MT  

He’s forgotten more than others will ever know about about renewable energy. I'm saying he's a global expert. Lovely guy.

ML 

Absolutely,  but on his pumped hydro atlas, maybe I'm over indexed to Europe, but, you know, most of European heavy industry is in areas — you could count out, perhaps, northern Italy — but if you look at Germany…

MT 

Areas where the topography isn't great…

ML  

So just saying to, you know, the Dutch system operator, ‘oh, we’re going to be doing pumped hydro.’ And then say we’ll do it in Switzerland and run some cables, because, of course, you've then got to get all of the power that you need from where the pumped hydro is to where it's needed. And you know, there is activity in pumped hydro in Europe. So Switzerland has just commissioned a new pumped hydro, which was incredibly expensive, still only half the per megawatt cost of Snowy 2.0. But it was very expensive, and the Swiss have no interest in supplying much more of that to supply Holland, to supply Belgium, to supply all of the flat countries where it doesn't work. So it just felt pretty fanciful to me.

MT  

What, pumped hydro? 

ML  

No, the Blakers plan for 800,000 locations for pumped hydro to solve problems.

MT  

Well, you know, you don't need to build 800,000 pumped hydro schemes. All he's trying to do is demonstrate that there are a lot of potential sites.

ML  

But he is presumably, and you in your role as president of the International Hydropower Association, you are presumably thinking of thousands of them.

MT  

I think, yes, ultimately, thousands. There would be several 100 pumped hydro projects, either under construction or under development in the world at the moment.

ML 

But I may be over indexing in Europe, but how many are there in Europe at the moment being developed?

MT  

I haven't got the, I'm not sure what the exact number is, but Europe has other difficulties. I mean, it's a different environment, say, to a country like Australia, but I think, and I agree with you, I mean, that the North German plane is obviously not fantastic for a Turkey pumped hydro. But equally, you've got the opportunity of using disused mines. There are a number of projects in Australia which are using disused mine sites. The Genex site at the Kidston mine in Queensland is very near completion. BHP is working with Acciona to develop pumped hydro at the Mount Arthur coal mine.

ML  

This is a former open cast with a big hole in the ground?

MT  

Yeah, exactly. That's right. And there's another one in Queensland, Mount Royal. So there are places where, in an otherwise fairly flat landscape, you can get that elevation. But look, Andrew is not saying this is the solution for every country in the world. And you know, one of the things I think we've got to be very careful of is letting our skepticism, and I think with great respect, I think sometimes you do that, you get so enthusiastic about your skepticism that you go from saying there's a flaw in here that has not been noticed, which is important. You know, there's a flaw in this diamond. But you don't want to then say, ‘okay, it's a heap of junk, and we'll throw it out.’ So you've just got to be a little bit more, I think, nuanced about it. And I think the other thing we've got to do with hydro, and I believe that one of the challenges we've got, and this will be the focus of the pumped hydro conference, which the IHA is holding in Paris on the 9th and 10th of September, i.e. next week is the type of support that you need to make sure it gets built. Because the problem is in energy only markets like Australia, there isn't any clear value for storage for somebody who is a, say, standalone pumped hydro developer. Now, one of the reasons we did the deal we did with our own pumped hydro projects, which I might just say, each of them on two dams, existing reservoirs in the Hunter Valley.

ML  

These would be the Turnbull energy projects? 

MT

Turnbull Renewables. The two projects are in a company called Upper Hunter Hydro. And there’s two dams, Glenbourne Dam, the Glenys Creek Dam. In each case, the upper reservoir is about 8 million cubic meters of water. In each case, it's about 400 meters of head, and each of them will generate about 700 megawatts for 10 hours. So there's seven giga gigawatt hour storages. But Snowy 2.0 is 50 times as big as that, right? So they’re much more, you know, easy is not the right word, but they are less challenging to build.

ML  

More tractable, but it's very valuable. It's a valuable addition to the network. 

MT  

It absolutely is. And when you look, if you think about what a seven gigawatt hour battery would cost, it's vastly more than either of these projects would cost. And so now the reason why AGL is looking at it, and obviously, you know, there's a lot of work yet to be done, geotechnical work, but there's plenty of hurdles to get past before they actually build these things. One of the attractions that long duration storage has for AGL is they are a gentailer, so they've got 5 million customers. They've got coal fired power stations that are closing down. Damien Nicks, their CEO, talks about this a lot. He clearly knows that as he moves into a world where almost all of his primary generation is coming from solar and wind. He has got to have that storage. So he's investing in batteries. He's working on pumped hydro, so he needs it, right? But if you are a standalone hydro operator, pumped hydro operator, how are you going to be sure that you will get paid? And this is why you need subsidies. You know, whether it's the LTESA, you know, long term electricity supply agreement in New South Wales, which is state government subsidy, or the Commonwealth counterpart to that, or you just have government ownership, as the Queensland Government has had, or as the federal government has with Snowy 2.0. But you know, you said, once you say we need this long duration storage, then you've got to find a way to pay for it. You can't say we need this, we must have it to have a stable and reliable grid, but, oh, sorry, we can't afford to. We can't work out how to pay for it, therefore we're buggered. So you can't do that, right? You've got to find a way to make it work.

ML  

So I'm still smarting from your accusation that I'm throwing the baby out with the bathwater and being too negative. I think the issue is, you know, look, the role I play is, if anybody is enthusiastic, I try and talk them down.

MT 

Listen, I'm one of your biggest fans. I'm just saying to you. It's like a salesman, the counterpart of that is that the skeptics can become too skeptical and the promoter, the passionate believer, can, as we say crudely, in Australia, start believing their own bullshit. And that's why a bit of skepticism is very valuable

ML  

And overall, I try to sort of plow the central furrow, just to stay on the show. But I think I am actually a big fan of pumped storage, of hydro and of pumped storage. I'm somebody who is very aware of the downsides, environmental downsides, as well. Because, you know, it does have an impact on the environment.

MT

Well pumped storage actually does not have much impact, 

ML

depending on how it's built and whether it's new hydro and so on.

MT

Well let me give you an example. At the IHA, International Hydropower Association, we have a sustained hydropower sustainability standard, which is a very big part. It's a separate organization that we set up, and we can give a good housekeeping seal of approval for the sustainability of a hydro project, and we're very committed to that. But if you look at pumped hydro, if you take our project at Glenbourne Dam, the upper reservoir. So if you've got 8 million cubic meters of water, that is 40 hectares, which is about 100 acres at a 20 meter average depth. Now if everything else is underground, which it will be more or less, you're disturbing 100 acres. Now that is a tiny amount of land. I mean, you're not going to, no way you're going to generate 700 megawatts from 100 acres of solar, you certainly couldn't get 100 megawatts of wind power from for 100 acres. So it's actually a very efficient user of land and of water, because it's doing the round trip. And, you know, the other thing you can do, and there is a project in New South Wales at ACEN, you know, the Ayala family's big you know, a wing of the Ayala family's conglomerate is developing, which involves two new reservoirs. So literally having a bathtub at the bottom of the hill and a bathtub at the top of the hill, and you fill it and just water just goes round and round. So the trick with all this is, I mean, the criticism of pumped hydro is the civil costs — Moore's law does not apply to digging holes, regrettably — and finding the right sites. The great advantage of batteries is they're modular. So whether you have one battery sitting in your house, or whether you've got a million of them in a huge industrial BESS — battery electricity storage scheme — it's the same thing. It's like solar. You know, you've got one solar panel on your roof to charge your phone, or 10 million of them in a huge solar farm. It's the same product. So that's the advantage of modular technologies. But I think what we have to do with hydropower is, and this is where Andy Blakers’ work is very useful, and the work of the IHA is very useful, is we have to narrow down and find those projects that are cheaper to build. And obviously that's got a lot to do with the rock type, length to head ratio. This is a big issue. You know, 400 meters, two kilometers apart is one thing. 400 meters, 10 kilometers apart is quite different. Same elevation, but the second one is going to be too expensive.

ML  

So, I have an ancient history as a fluid dynamics guy. I'm trying to think of a 10 kilometer pipe and yeah, it does make a big difference. And, of course, the drilling costs. But it comes down to power market design, because there's one thing, of course, the state can always step in and just write a check. And we have a variant of that, which we call the regulated asset base model, which we're now building, Sizewell C, the nuclear power plant, which is essentially the state that writes the check. It's not quite as simple, because Goldman Sachs, your alma matter wants a piece.

MT

And has the price of that project blown up?

ML

Oh yes, of course, I think it's £42 billion pounds we're actually going to have. 

MT

What was the original contract price? 

ML

Oh, I think it was… The contracts have only just been signed, the initial marketing price was, of course, much, much lower, like your, your $2 billion, or whatever, for snowy 2.0. But no, it's blown out. And I'm going to have the the CEO, I'm going to have the head of that — Julia Pyke, who has been pushing that project — on the show shortly, so we’ll get into the detail.

MT  

So you know Flyvbjerg, Bent Flyvbjerg. 

ML

Yes, he’s also been on the show. 

MT 

He's absolutely fantastic. And his work, you know, underlines the fact… I mean, one of the interesting things out of his work on why these big projects always blow their budgets is that the original budget was too low in the first place, to get that approval. But again, you can't really say that about Snowy. That $6 billion blowout is very explicable. Part of it was due to a mistake, by the way, a tunneling mistake, but of all the big projects that were started during my term in government, there were quite a few, the only one that is on time and on budget is the construction of the Western Sydney Airport, which is amazingly going to open next year. And it's actually built now, and it's on budget. But everything else is blown out.

ML  

I have scar tissue from projects blowing out. I was on the board of Transport for London. I was on the Finance Committee of Crossrail, now the Elizabeth line, and we were, essentially, I'm not going to use the word lie, because that's a big word, but we were not provided with the information on the finance committee that we should have had. I got somewhat distracted, because there was a big tram crash, and people were killed, and I was on the safety committee, chair of the safety committee and was dealing with that, so I didn't push hard enough. But we were supposed to be launching that thing in December 2018, and in July 2018 I left the board. And in August 2018, a four year delay was announced. So it was supposed to be four months later, and then it was a four year delay. So everything's on track until it's not 

MT  

Well, that's true, but on the other hand, you know if you're not prepared to run the risk of cost blowouts and delays, then you'd never undertake any big projects.

ML  

You wouldn't do big projects again. And that comes down to batteries. I think what's fascinating about the contrast between Snowy 2.0 or, frankly, big projects, pumped hydro or nuclear and solar and batteries, particularly the batteries piece is people are buying batteries right now in Australia in huge numbers, huge numbers for resilience, but they're putting it at the point of use. They want to control that. That resilience has extra value because it sits in their home and they can decide to use it for their car or for their appliances or for their air conditioning, versus these big projects with a much bigger chance of a cost blowout that sit in the sense helping to support the supply side rather than the demand side?

MT  

Well, I agree with you, and that this is a big focus of Australian policy at the moment, the Albanese government, the Labor government, is subsidizing, effectively, a 30% subsidy on home batteries. It's been a massive roll out. There is a huge amount of opportunity for batteries on commercial and industrial premises. Again, a good person to talk to, potentially, is Matt Keane, who's a young guy. You probably met him. He's now the chair of the climate authority in Australia, and you know, which advises the government on its climate and energy transition policies. And Matt's very focused on the C&I opportunities. 

ML

C&I? 

MT

Sorry, commercial and industrial, as opposed to residential. And you know, if you look, you just think of all of those…

ML  

Warehouses, box retailers, logistics., subway stations.

MT  

Cover them with solar, and if you've got batteries, there you are. The great thing about that is you do not have to build a transmission line. You're behind the meter effectively. And I think this is going to be a very big part of it. I mean, this is why you're doing your podcast. And, I mean, I salute you for that, and of course, for starting BNEF, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which I'm sure everyone on this show knows what that means. I mean, you've been such a beacon of intelligence and information in this area. I thank you for that. But this is what is so exciting. This is a complete revolution in energy. You know, we're going from an environment where we had a relatively small number of big, central thermal generators to now a situation where,millions of people got their own little power stations at home with their solar panels and their batteries, and, you know, not to speak of all of the commercial generation with wind farms and solar farms and so forth.

ML  

So I think that's the fascination. I've been doing this for 20 years, and there are still really big questions we don't know the answers to. So storage, we all know we need a lot of it, but is it going to be on the demand side, behind the meter? How much of it will be co-located with supply and so on? Absolutely fascinating. Still big questions are open. Finally, next week in Paris, the International Hydropower Association Conference, I'll be there. I hope it isn't just a kind of ‘get Michael, because he's not a believer.’ 

MT

I think you are a believer. 

ML

I'm kind of a believer, but I'm going to be a skeptical believer in hydro and pumped hydro. But what is your ask? Let's just finish off with: at that event, what will be your ask? Is it to investors? Is it to policy makers? Is it just generic publicity for hydro? What are you going there to achieve? 

MT  

Well, it's, and we've also got a delegation going to Brussels the day afterward to talk to the European Commission. Look, it's essentially saying to governments that you need the support to get these projects built. Now, the simple way of doing it is for the government to build it. Obviously, that's easy, but if you want the private sector to do it, you've got to give some kind of underwriting of the revenue for a period that enables, essentially, to get the debt finance in. And that's what the New South Wales government scheme does.

ML 

Capacity payment, or something like that?

MT  

Something like that. Or you say, we will guarantee you an agreed amount of revenue. If you go over that, we share the ups. If you go under that…

b  

Collar and cap 

MT

Correct. There's lots of ways of doing this. There are a million ways of doing this. 

ML

But you've got to have one of them.

MT  

You've got to have one. And you've if you decide that… it seems to me, what you've got to do, and this is essentially saying, this is a former politician, former head of government, you've got to work out how much storage you need. And I would suggest, then add a bit. And I know you would say that's ridiculous, but I'm just telling you, the punters have very low tolerance for the lights going out..

ML  

I would say, get started, to be honest, I wouldn't say necessarily, add a bit. I would say, do something.

MT  

Yes, correct. Michael, you're absolutely right, and I'm, I'm happy to be corrected there. I think that you've got to get cracking on it, and then you've just got to work out what is the way that will work. And you've got to talk to industry, and you've got to talk to the bankers and you know, it may involve subsidies. If you go look in Australia, you know, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation used to provide a lot of soft loans to fund solar farms and wind farms. They don't do that anymore, because in the private sector everyone understands the economics of it, and what will happen is the economics of storage of long duration storage, once you've got the policy settings right, will be such that you won't need to have the same level of government support. And if it is really just an underwriting to get you through the final investment decision, FID, another acronym, then it's just a price that you've got to pay one way or the other. I mean, the thing that we were all grappling with is, how much electricity are we going to need. I mean, I don't know about you, but 20 years ago, when I started looking at these issues pretty seriously, in 2007 I was John Howard's environment minister. I mean, these were the halcyon days when Tony Abbott and I were both ministers in the government, a Liberal government, a center-right government that supported an emissions trading scheme. Before all of that change, when Tony became the great warrior against it and so forth. But in those days, what we're really talking about was, how much extra are we prepared to pay to save the planet and replace coal fired generation with renewables? We're now in a situation where renewables are cheaper. If you have to build a new power plant from scratch, there is no question what you're going to do in Australia, and it absolutely isn't a coal fired power station.

ML  

I remember saying that in 2012 and there was outrage. Apparently it dominated the news wires for three days that BloombergNEF said that renewables were cheaper than coal, and it was just, it was practically a constitutional crisis.

MT  

Yeah. And you see, one of the problems that the large-l Liberal Party has in Australia, you know, the center right party. At the last election, where they basically got wiped out, one of the things that caused them to be wiped out was they were swallowing this culture war approach to climate that you get in the Murdoch media and elsewhere. And they said,  ‘Renewables are terrible. We should go nuclear.’ They seemed to think that was a great idea. It was diabolical. I mean, it's the worst defeat the Liberal party's ever had in its history. And one of the reasons for that in Australia is you there is literally, I would say, 99% of Australians either have solar panels on their roof or know somebody who does. And so to say to an Australian, ‘That renewable energy is terrible and puts your costs up,’ they're going to say, ‘no, no, it doesn't actually, it brings my bill down.’ Or ‘my mate Fred never stops boring me witless about how much money he's saving.’ So I'm confident about the transition, if I could just leave you with a warning, not to you, but just generally for all of us. And that is, we've got to be careful of technological Micawber-ism, you know, Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield? He was always broke and saying, ‘Don't worry, something will turn up. Something will turn up.’ And there is a tendency to say, ‘oh, a new technology will come along.’ I think Bill Gates is guilty of this sometimes. Now, who am I to criticize one of the creators of the modern world? But if you're fascinated with innovation, and I am, too, there's a tendency to say, ‘Oh, we don't have to do this, build this hydro plant today, because there's going to become a super battery, or something's going to come around the corner tomorrow.’ The problem is that we don't have the time to spare. We've got every resource — and I know you've said this many times too, Michael — every resource to meet this challenge in abundance, except for time. And that's why yes, there may be some super technology 10 or 20 years from now, but if we sit on our hands and it doesn't arrive, we will really be cooked. 

ML

That wishful thinking is not a strategy. 

MT

That's right. Hope is not a strategy. Or, as the Athenian ambassadors cruelly said to the Melians in that wonderful passage in  Thucydides. They said, when the Melians said, ‘Oh yes, you've got more numbers than us. Yes, we recognize you're stronger than us. And yes, we understand we should give in to you, but you know, there's always a chance that we'll win. And the Athenians said, ‘hope is a dangerous comforter.’

ML 

That's straight out of Donald Trump's playbook for energy system planning. It's a great pleasure talking to you

MT  

Great to be with you. Thank you very much. 

ML

Thank you.

ML  

So that was Malcolm Turnbull, former Prime Minister of Australia, now energy investor and all round elder statesman. As always, we'll put links in the show notes to resources that we mentioned during our conversation. So that's the episode with another former Australian PM, Tony Abbott, episode 52. The episode with Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, who wrote ‘How Big Things Get Done,’ that's episode 128. And the episode that Bryony recorded with Andrew Forrest, episode 210. We'll also put a link to the piece that I wrote in 2011 for BloombergNEF called Ya Basta about the need to stop having COP meetings, and a link to Snowy 2.0 and to the International Hydropower Association. And with that, as always, I'd like to thank our producer, Oscar Boyd, our video editor, Jamie Oliver, the team behind Cleaning Up, and you the audience for joining us today. I'd also like to welcome two new members of the Cleaning Up leadership circle. So that's Cygnum Capital, an investment bank and asset manager focusing on Africa, and Arup, the global design planning and engineering consultancy. Please join us at this time next week for another episode of Cleaning Up. 

ML

Cleaning Up is supported by its Leadership Circle. The members are Actis, Alcazar Energy, Arup, Cygnum Capital, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP of Portugal, Eurelectric, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit cleaningup.live. If you've enjoyed this episode, please hit like, leave a comment, and also recommend it to friends, family, colleagues and absolutely everyone. To browse the archive of over 200 past episodes, and also to subscribe to our free newsletter, visit cleaningup.live.