Hitachi Energy Leads the Energy Transition

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