Customer Logins
Obtain the data you need to make the most informed decisions by accessing our extensive portfolio of information, analytics, and expertise. Sign in to the product or service center of your choice.
Customer Logins
Apr 12, 2021
38:56 min MINS
EnergyCents- Ep 31: New entrants: The ‘prosumer’ as potential force in evolving renewables landscape
Nearly all forms of renewable energy continue to attract investment as myriad technologies fight for market share amid a rapidly changing energy landscape. S&P Global’s Head of Global Cleantech Research Eduard Sala de Vedruna joins EnergyCents this week to discuss the growth of global renewables, and consider differences in momentum by region and by technology.
SUBSCRIBE: Apple | Spotify | RSS | Google Play
- EnergyCents - Ep 31: New entrants: The ‘prosumer’ as potential force in evolving renewables landscape
-
Female Speaker: This episode of EnergyCents is brought to you by S&P Global's Financial and Capital Markets Energy Advisory Group. Our team of experts provides the investment community with actionable insight and integrated thought leadership that identify the trends and trend makers of global energy markets. Solutions cover the full energy and natural resources sector, from traditional fossil fuels to emerging clean tech ideas and supply chains, and are available via recurring reports, webinars, robust data sets, and personal engagements with experts.
Hill Vaden: All right. Welcome back to EnergyCents and S&P Global Market podcast that focuses on the intersection of energy and finance. This is Hill Vaden and I’m here today with Eduard Sala de Vedruna who leads our clean tech practice within the S&P Global Energy Research Consulting Team. Eduard how are you.
Eduard: I'm very good, thank you. Thanks, Hill for having me here today.
Hill Vaden: Gladly, yeah we've been, we've been scheduling and rescheduling this for several days and weeks now. So I'm excited that we're finally able to put this together.
Eduard: Finally.
Hill Vaden: A busy person with a very important topic. So Eduard joins us today from Barcelona which he let me know just before the before we started recording. And I understand you're a fan of Barcelona football or soccer.
Eduard: Indeed, indeed yeah I am, I am. Yeah as I mentioned to you maybe it's not the best year to talk about football or soccer because the team is not performing that well this year as we were used to. But well yeah they're playing the last games have been quite good, so yeah I am optimistic.
Hill Vaden: What's the general take because they leaked Messi's contract information earlier this year, right and what's the general is there backlash on the I don't remember the signing bonus, but it was huge, his pay is making it real hard for Barcelona do anything else.
Eduard: Yeah it's true but at the same time you yeah you would guess that he's generating more money for FC Barcelona than the money that he calls, right. He's the greatest player that has ever, well the greatest soccer player of history I would say at least of modern history. So I think that having him in FC Barcelona should be a priority. So it is clearly an asset for the club and I hope that he's going to stay. At this point is more hope than anything else, but yeah hope.
Hill Vaden: What do you think the [indiscernible] [00:02:32] for him within Manchester City?
Eduard: It's hard to say because at the end soccer it's yeah it's a business. We're talking here from a from a supporter standpoint, I would like to believe that he's going to stay with us that he feels the colors the club and that he's going to stay for life. But at the same time he's a professional he wants to to win tournaments, he wants to be to win the Championship. At Champion [indiscernible] [00:03:02] he wants to make sure that he has a competitive team playing with him. So and of course [indiscernible] [00:03:09] Guardiola he's a fantastic coach so and they know each other very well. So yeah we will see, we will see.
Hill Vaden: We'll see, my mentioned that my son and I watch Manchester City pretty closely and we're I suppose less interested in Messy moving over there and he my son is a defender. And so Manchester City's duo win the battle this year with Stones and Ruben Dias has been incredible and fun to watch especially as someone kind of naturally interested in defence to begin with.
Eduard: Yeah I think it would not be bad to add Messy to that right.
Hill Vaden: Or Holland if they can bring in Holland because Aguero is in all likelihood and moving on or at least less the contributor than he was. Well you know I could sit here and talk European soccer all day, but...
Hill Vaden: Yeah but that’s not the topic of today's all right.
Eduard: That is that the topic of today's pot and we may you know find as many friends as enemies talking about soccer.
Male Speaker: That’s correct.
Hill Vaden: So maybe clean tech is a little bit less controversial when talking about football. So Eduard you know as I mentioned you lead the clean tech division within S&P Global and so we've done a lot of podcasts or a handful of podcasts with members of your team looking specifically at one renewal renewable technology or another, but really haven't done one that looks at the room the rise of renewables relative to one another and so I'm excited to have that conversation with you. So I guess you know maybe just kind of a first place to start as we're looking at the overall market opportunity for renewables, you know, that there's curiosity at the regional level and curiosity at the technological level whether wind, solar, batteries. Can you help put all this into context frame it for us in terms of what are the regions that are really driving things globally today and what are the technologies that that are you know I suppose really leading the way with us.
Eduard: Well I think that when you think about the geography is right where the growth from renewables is coming from. I think that you have like three main poles right of development. One is the historical poll that is Europe is where most of the renewables were built and where a lot of renewables continue to be built nowadays. We have the US and north America where we have this mainly the US with a quite healthy level of additions and recording traditional gear levels, for example, last year, but then you have Asia. And Asia within Asia you can you have basically two main countries that are driving the growth, one is Mainland China that accounts for around 40 of the total growth globally and you have India another important growth in China, but we are seeing a lot of countries in Southeast Asia as well Australia popping up and adding capacity. So in terms of regions really the gravity center is moving towards Asia. Asia is really going to be the contributor to the growth of renewables going forward over 60 of the new growth that we expect in the coming years is going to come from that region and we will continue to have Europe and North America playing a key role. Between the three regions we're going to have 90 more or less of all the additions that we expect, you have to be to cut to happen within the next 30 years globally.
And then when we when we look at technology is the story is very similar in the sense that the largest technology in terms of additions is going to be solar photovoltaic, solar photovoltaics is going to add to account for around 60 of all the additions and then you have two other technologies that are going to contribute to the remaining 40% more or less that are onshoring and offshoring. So really these are the three technologies solar photovoltaics onshoring and offshoring that are going to account for 95% of the renewables editions globally. One thing that is important maybe to mention here is that when you think about these technologies they are very different by nature. So solar photovoltaics you have to type of projects that are going to be built. One is what we call utility scale projects, we talk about projects bigger larger than five megawatts and then we have distributed, distributed solar. And by distributed solar we talk about smaller installations that normally are going to be all on the roofs of warehouses, on the roofs of houses in industrial side, so we are talking about a much more distributed way of building solar plants.
Then we have the utility scale, these are the large solar plants that you see when you drive in the road and then you see this big this big installations of solar, solar panels. And then you have and what is important maybe to keep in mind is that 50 of all the solar editions are going to come in the form of distributed solar. So we're talking about small installations and then you have onshore wind and offshore wind that to the two other technologies that basically offshore wind is really big projects, we're talking about projects of an average size of 100-200 megawatts of capacity. So really we're talking about big investments, we are talking about massive projects right. Onshore wind, we are talking about smaller projects in the range depending on the regions as well, but on average we could talk about something around 50 megawatts projects, but in places like the US clearly the size is going to be bigger and in other places in Europe the size or the size is going to be smaller and this is more determined by the availability of space.
Hill Vaden: Alright in such when you talk about I guess solar why don't we start there, you know, if 50 is going to be on that distributed model that the rooftop model, are we talking about. How do the business models differ or the solar companies who are targeting more residential or and using customers versus more the utility based customer. One is dealing with thousands of customers versus a much smaller handful, right.
Eduard: Exactly We are talking about business models that are completely different and revenue streams that are completely different in the sense that when you are thinking about an investment let's imagine for a commercial or industrial side right, the rationale behind building or installing solar panels normally is to offset the retail price right is to be able to produce your own generation to produce your own electricity that you consume and then you offset the power price that you have to pay through the through the retail fee. So clearly the cost competitiveness of these installations or the attractiveness of these installations is going to be driven by the price of the retail power prices, right, is the level of the retail power price. When you think about a larger scale solar farm basically what you are trying to compete is against the wholesale price or you're going to trying to compete to be able to sign PPAs, PPA is agreement with procurement agreements with corporations. So in terms of the size that's one thing that is going to be very different and that means that the development skills that you need to have in order to develop a big large solar farms versus distributed installations is completely different in terms of the approach in terms of the business model that you are trying that you have to develop in terms of the structure that you need to have and then in terms of the revenues as well, the revenues that you are going after are completely different revenue. So the logic of the investment is a slightly different.
Hill Vaden: And are you selling directly to the end user in that in the distributed environment. And is that true or are you seeing the same distribution of activity across all regions or that there seems to be some level of sophistication as end user to decide to put solar panels on is it a roof.
Eduard: No exactly, exactly so that brings us to another figure that is quite interesting is what we call the prosumer right. So this is a word that is being used quite a lot in Europe but as well in the US and it's this idea that you have a producer that is consumer at the same time, right.
Hill Vaden: It's that prosumer.
Eduard: Prosumer, a producer and consumer rise the fusion of the towards, and that's interesting because you have your own solar plant in the roof of your warehouse or in your industrial area and basically what you do is that you produce or you sell your electricity to the grid, but at the same time you consume the electricity that you produced. And the reason behind that is basically you want to offset or you want to get a cheaper electricity then the alternative that would be to buy the electricity from the network. So really and then, by going back to your question about you’re selling to the end consumer. And this is true in places when this is allowed and that that means that not everywhere in the world the figure of a prosumer can be deployed because not everywhere you have free markets where people can decide to produce their own electricity or versus buying the electricity from the network. In some markets and industrial company has to buy directly the electricity from the network, so the figure of the prosumer is not it's not possible. So it's really and I hear the regulation and the type of the structure of the power markets is what defines the different business models that we are seeing emerging in different places related to the same to the same activity that is basically producing electricity using solar panels.
Hill Vaden: And where are the prosumers, if they're not everywhere.
Eduard: There are in places where it is allowed, they are in Europe, they are in North America, you start to see them as well in some places in Latin America, you have them starting in some places in Africa. So people who basically produce their electricity, but I think what is important as well in the fear of the prosumer, prosumer is a producer and consumer in the sense that you produce and you sell and you consume. In some places where you cannot produce and sell to the grid because you are not allowed what we see is people who develop of regeneration, so basically they develop their own generation in their industrial side just to fulfill their energy requirements. In this case they are not going to be treated as prosumers, they are going to be treated as well self-generation; in that case it will be called self-generation.
Hill Vaden: Use your backlash from the traditional utility providers in these markets.
Eduard: Of course because that's the typical risk of great defection, right. There is going to be a point that people might decide that they don't buy from the grid and they produce their own electricity. This is demand that is going to disappear, so an incumbent utility this is really concerned about that because that's the market that disappears and it's captured by the consumer basically that is producing its own electricity. So at the beginning we saw a little bit pushback from utilities or a lot of pushback let's put it like this trying to avoid this phenomenon to happen by pressing forcing the regulators to change the regulation to make sure that self-consumption was not allowed. In other places we saw taxes being applied to self-generation of electricity. In other cases, we have seen as well some taxes being put or the obligation for people to remain connected to the grid. But what we have seen as well is that because the cost of renewables is going down so dramatically and it's unstoppable, this is something that is going to happen anyway. So as this is happening anyway what we have seen recently is that the utilities have changed their approach and instead of opposing they have embraced this movement, right. Because at the end it's very simple is that if there is the risk of cannibalization of my business there are two options or I cannibalize myself my business or I wait for somebody else to cannibalize it. So clearly self-generation has been perceived by new entrants as an opportunity to enter in markets where you had a very strong incumbent. The incumbent has interest in capturing this opportunity instead of letting it available or leaving it available to its competitors. So we are seeing -- we're seeing a change in the in the approach from incumbent utilities and you are seeing that in many countries this incumbent players they have been really developing businesses around self-consumption and empowering consumers to produce their own electricity.
Hill Vaden: And are they viewing it yet as a partner where they see the, if I produce more say solar electricity than I need at my house and want to move it to you, I would think I would need the utilities infrastructure to get it from me to you or some sort of connection, is there any sort of that partnership model being [indiscernible] [00:16:31].
Eduard: Between utilities you mean and…
Hill Vaden: And prosumers that if I'm thinking about this correctly the utility connects each of the prosumer is still, right.
Eduard: Exactly and the utility, the utility has different business right or businesses one businesses around the distribution right distributing the electricity, so it's the physical the wires that bring electricity from the generation center to the consumption from where the consumption is, that's one utility business, another utility business is just providing the electricity, right, you generate the electricity and you sell the electricity. So what we are saying is that utilities being the ones that offer the possibility of connecting not just connecting the prosumer with the networks and bringing the electricity to other clients. What we are seeing as well is utilities putting the facility is going to industrial players and proposing them to develop their own generation capacity and giving them access to panels, helping them in the design of the installation, just to make sure that if it's not them who do that there is going to be somebody else who is going to try to jump into with this opportunity and took after this opportunity. So we are seeing the utilities being active quite active into that. I would say that it's not always and not everywhere the same right, there is some utilities are more active than others even in the US, right you have some utilities that are that are just working on the focus on their utility business and they are not doing anything in that in that space. On the contrary we are seeing like Austin Energy and companies like this being really proactive and really being very creative in offering new business models and new alternative to their client base really being innovative.
The same happens in Europe in Europe what we have seen is a lot of the utilities as well incumbent utilities really pushing and accelerating their transformation being present in this in this distributed generation business. As I said at the end it's a survival question is that, it's me who it's on my own plate or somebody else is going to come and to eat from my client base. And then yeah they have taken more of a pragmatic approach.
Hill Vaden: And are the companies themselves the solar companies themselves are these different where one is focused on the residential customer and one focused on the utility customer or are they different models within the same company with the same provider.
Eduard: Well I think, I think it's a mix I would say that maybe we can start by the end, right. When you think about this, I see that as being different channels right. One channel is you develop you produce the electricity that you sell to the to the market, so it's basically you have more of a generation business that it's linked to the utility business, for that you need a certain set of skills, right. You need to be able to design big plans, you need to be able to deal with wholesale prices. You really need to have -- you need to produce your electricity in a very utility type mode. So this requires a certain skill set. When you're selling individual clients, when you are targeting residential consumers or you're talking C&I know commercial and industrial consumers, the type of a structure that you need to have as a company is different. It's just because the scale of the designs or the projects is different as well the clients that you have a much more atomized you have multiple clients that you have to deal with, so yourselves force your engineering force has to be designed in order to be cost effective, so the approach is very different. And then what I would say is that these two businesses are to businesses that are completely different and we tend to have specialist players in each of this segment. That said but we are when you think about one utility company like think about the Western utilities that are provided, the Western, the European utilities that are international utilities who are active in the US.
For example NL Iberdrola [00:20:44] [indiscernible] the US, for example, these companies they have two different businesses, they are developers of capacity, so there are renewables developers, so they know how to develop a big solar farm and they know how to really maximize the revenue that they get from this process if they sell to the wholesale market. But at the same time they have a utility business and they have a residential business, they have a structure that or the experience in their home markets to deal with individual services or even they have utility businesses, right. So these companies they tried or they tend to combine the two services or the two approaches they have, the development arm that basically is the largest scale development body that develops large projects, but at the same time they have a business unit that focuses on residential and commercial and industrial clients. But these are more the exceptions, these are what we call integrated international utilities have these two businesses coexisting in the, yeah in the company.
Hill Vaden: And do you notice any sort of preference for one side or the other or returns higher on the call of the bigger side as I would assume hitting many, many customers in the way that one would have to do with residential is going to affect your return profile more than working with one very large customer.
Eduard: Yeah but at the same time I would say that the margins can be relatively higher. I think the complexity is driven by the atomization of the client base that you have to go to and the fact that you have to multiply several times the same type of project and to tailor it to clients. So the cost per unit delivered is going to be higher at the same time, what you can do is that the value that you extract if you're good at that is that you can extract different revenue streams from the same as that right, one revenue stream can be linked just to the sale of the electricity to the end consumer. But at the same time you can if you control this generation what you can do is that you can provide services to the system to the power system, that's another revenue stream that if you control this this is the generation from this asset. This is a revenue stream that you can go after, right. So that's I think that the ability of combining or stacking different revenues or different layers of revenue to the same asset is what's going to make the difference between a successful company in that space and not.
The thing is that in terms of preference I think it depends a lot on the markets. In some markets are much more treatable and much more interesting for larger scale projects for some of these companies, and in other markets especially the whole markets where these companies already have a retail business going for this CNA group of companies is going to be interesting. Another thing that is important as well it relates to the entry barriers, right. When you're talking about very big projects normally it's okay the costs are going to be lower you can optimize the cost, but at the same time competition tends to be extremely fierce because the entry barriers are relatively low. So you see a lot of players competing for the same opportunity. When you're talking about commercial and industrial there are some entry barriers are some cause that are related more or to the ability of accessing the end consumer right having a sales force that is able to identify consumers that has the relationship with the consumers. And this is something that utilities tend to leverage on their benefit, it's much more difficult to get into this atomized space because getting access to the client normally it's a time consuming and a resource consuming effort. So what I'm trying to say is that it depends on which market and depends on what is the starting point, there is more preference for one or the other model.
Hill Vaden: So if we look if we put the traditional utilities who can really compete on project size and scale of to the side of the second or are you seeing any particularly innovative companies who are defining that new space differently than their peers.
Eduard: I think that there are more or less more or less the same one thing that we are seeing and I think that's important, is that when you think about the truly global players, what we are seeing is that in the past they used to, when you think about the utility and you look at the assets that they're they have been owning since I would say since 2010 or something like this, I'm not going to more in order to look much for much backward. But 2010 to now, the largest players in the world and the largest utilities they had preference for on showing. On showing has been the preferred technology that they have been investing in, why, because the onshore wind for them was larger scale business, big projects, and work dealing with complexity was more important. So it was easier for them to differentiate from their competitors, right. So and when you look at the portfolios of the I would say the top 20 companies in the world in terms of renewables, the preferred technology is onshore wind.
Hill Vaden: Onshore wind.
Eduard: Onshore wind yeah, onshore wind. And in fact when you look at the installed base onshore wind together with solar PV is the most installed technology globally. The thing is that what we are seeing and what we have been observing over the past years is that the companies are tending to change their portfolios or to complemented portfolios. It's very rare that you have companies that are just focusing on one technology. They tend to combine the technologies and normally the biggest international players they tend to have onshore wind increasingly of solar PV and they are adding as well the offshoring bid in them. Why because depending on the countries where they want to go they choose a technology strategy, right. Not all the markets are sweetable for all the technologies, not all the technologies have the same value. So if you combine different technologies if your portfolio is much more diverse that means that you can get a much balanced portfolio and then the return on the total portfolio is going to be higher. So it's more about optimization of portfolios and we are seeing this trend happening and it's quite it's quite interesting because it's a transformation of the traditional portfolios of companies, all the time. And now basically what we have seen is more of an increased interest into offshore and that's for sure.
Hill Vaden: And we spoke I guess it was about two or three weeks ago with Andre in depth on offshore wind, and we spoke of when speaking with him we talked a lot about the high barriers to entry and how these big projects suit big companies and the project complexity. How should we be looking at onshore wind, is that a relatively simple. I guess one how should we looking onshore wind relative to offshore wind and then to how should we be looking onshore wind relative to solar.
Eduard: I think that onshore wind is the technology that is more on the pressure I would say because it's a technology that is more complex than onshore wind and more expensive than onshore, I'm sorry onshore wind is more complex and expensive than solar photovoltaics. But at the same time the capacity factor or the output that you generate from solar, I from onshore wind versus solar is higher. So what we are saying is that onshore wind it's a technology that in some cases is not preferred or solar is preferred an onshore wind just because it's a simpler technology. Onshore wind has the complexity of moving parts right, you have think about the windmill, the three blades spinning, so you have a lot of mechanical fatigue, you have a lot of tear of the materials. So the maintenance the complexity of managing wind farm is greater than the complexity of managing a solar, a solar farm right. But at the same time the advantage of onshore wind versus solar is the amount of electricity that you can you can extract from a given site for a certain level of capacity. So it's more complex, it's more expensive than solar. If solar it's an alternative to onshore wind, people tend to prefer solar rather than onshore wind. The other thing is that because of complex but then complexity is interesting and some companies they prefer to focus onshore wind because they can create some entry barriers, right. They can complexity is a way for them to bring to the table things that financial players or less experienced players cannot bring cannot bring and as a result they can ring fence their investment.
However when you think about offshoring, offshoring is much more complex and bigger than onshoring. So a lot of displayers who are looking for volumes and who are looking for areas where they can bring their expertise they are turning their eyes into offshore wind as a more interesting alternative rather than onshoring. So that's why I'm saying that onshore wind is a little bit under a lot of pressure because despite being the most popular technology in the past now you have that in places where simplicity matters, you're going to have more solar photovoltaics being deployed rather than onshoring and in places where complexity of companies that value more complexity, you're going to see offshore wind being deployed before onshore wind. And the other thing that is as well is important is that NBS and right opposition it's much more complicated to especially when you go for two very big towers onshore wind is getting a lot of pushback from the public opinion where people there is a lot of, there's big NBS and movements in and this is a phenomenon that is happening almost everywhere in the world. People don't want to have their this very large wind turbines and wind chills spinning next to their houses or in the middle of… You mentioned that you were that you were on a on a road trip right last week and when you cross and you have this fantastic landscape and you start to see hundreds of windmills maybe it's not the best visual impact, right. If you have solar panels you barely see them right, it's less aggressive in terms of visuals.
And that's why what we are seeing is that in some places some countries are preferring just to prioritize offshore wind as an alternative to onshore wind because offshore wind doesn't have the problem of NBS, and you have all the problems related to marine routes and it's you have issues with fishermen and things like this, but at the same time you don't have the problem around visual impact that you have with onshore wind. So that's why I'm saying that solar I saw onshore wind is it's a little bit on the under pressure right now. But still we do expect that that is going to be a significant contributor to the growth. I think that just globally to 2015, one quarter 26% of all the capacity that's going to be added globally is going to come from onshore wind, it's true that solar PV is going to be 60% as I said at the beginning, but an offshore wind that is it's getting a lot of momentum and a lot of headlines is going to account for 11% more or less according to our forecast of the total additions that we're going to see between now and 2015.
Hill Vaden: You were talking about NIMBYism or not in my backyard is, you know, if you know as we discussed I drove to California last week or two weeks ago and you know there were huge wind farms all over west Texas and there were also some very large solar farms and a lot of you know oil fields. What's the scale in term these large solar fields or solar farms is there some sort of acre metric of I need X acres to build a wind farm onshore and I need X acres to build a solar farm to get the same amount of electricity.
Eduard: Yeah well that's not 1-1 because the thing is that what you have with windows that you can decide on the size of the turbans that you use and the type of and the size of the blades that you use, so there is no, you don't you don't have an exact metric to compare to compare things in terms of renewable additions. The capacity that has been added over the past 20 years it's going, it's six times less than the capacity that is going to be added in the next 30 years. So to give you just a sense of the magnitude right and if you think about all the hundreds of windmills that you saw on your way to California if all this new capacity will have to be built well imagine the amount of new wind farms that will have to be built and this is going to potentially have a significant environmental impact in terms of visual impact. And we are seeing that in more densely populated areas like in Europe in France for example NIMBYism may speak even in Germany NIMBYism is starting to be important. We are seeing a lot of NIMBYism in the UK where it's almost impossible to build onshore wind. So this is something that the more you had capacity, the more sensitive people become to this to this visual impact. And in our view this is well going to be one of the inhibitors of the growth of this technology going forward.
Hill Vaden: Well maybe this is a good place to finish and I'd love to continue this conversation and our conversation on Barcelona soccer, but maybe that's for another podcast. But as we're looking at it feels like solar is highly disruptive in a sense to some of the wind as solar gets more mature in the way the wind got, is it right to look for kind of solar NIMBYism on the back of this as well and is that opened the door you know as we're thinking of perhaps new technologies is there another technology we should be watching that starts to make inroads here.
Eduard: Well I think that I think I think we are going to see onshore wind and solar windy general and solar photovoltaics for years. Because even if there is envy isn't one of the advantages of solar photovoltaics is that you basically can develop fit it in many different places, it can be installed on roofs of the warehouses, it can be installed in the middle of nowhere. You can you can have activities underneath, so we ask is what I said is that we are starting to see some initiatives to have agricultural activities under the solar panels, right. So the idea is really to create or to minimize the amount of land that you are impacted by the build out of this capacity. So I think that the people are companies are going to be extremely creative going forward because basically the cost is going down so rapidly that it makes and it's worth to make the effort of trying to be creative in finding alternative or solutions to the to the [indiscernible] [00:35:50] is problem when it comes to solar. When it comes to one show when it's a little bit more complicated because physically you need to have the turbine you need to have the blades and you need to capture the wind? So in that sense onshore wind is going to be a little under a lot of pressure. What we are going to see is that the development of the nuclear turbines of the improvement of the turbines and generators, what is going to allow is that for the same size you're going to be able to produce much more electricity. So that means that for the same equivalent amount of megawatts of a wind farm, you're going to be able to have less turbines and then that means that the visual impact is going to be minimized instead of having to install 10 turbines maybe with two turbines you're going to have to be able to have the same output. But still you're going to have to very big turbans that are going to be spinning that are going to impact the landscape. But that said I think that the technology and NIMBYism is not a new phenomenon, we have seen it on the discussion in Europe for many years and currently we are starting to see a lot of NIMBYism, but the industry and the technology has been able to adapt and has been able to deliver I would say and to answer some of the questions and to overcome some of the issues around NIMBYism.
So I don't think that it's going to be enough of an inhibitor to enable a completely neutral technology to come up and to displace solar photovoltaics or wind from the map, we don't see that happening over the next 30 years.
Hill Vaden: All right, well fantastic. Well this has been super interesting and thank you for your time and I look forward to continuing the conversation with you sometime soon.
Eduard: Yeah thanks a lot Hill, I think that we will have certainly to continue with the discussion because this is just yeah it was just a snapshot right of what's going on. I think that there is much more underneath. You know there is another element that is going to be important is going to be around the investment. So one day we can maybe have a chat as well about so what that means in terms of investment for but the different technologies and opportunities for investors.
Hill Vaden: It sounds great, thanks Eduard.
Eduard: Also thanks to you.
Female Speaker: To read additional insights from our team of experts visit our blog at www.ihsmarkit.com/energy blog. You can also find our experts on social media by searching for S&P Global Energy on either Twitter or LinkedIn. Have a topic idea or want to send us feedback, email our podcast team at energycents@ihsmarkit.com.
Male Speaker: This podcast contains information and insights copyrighted by S&P Global. To learn more about S&P Global Energy Solutions visit ihsmarkit.com/energy, that's I-H-S-M-A-R-K-I-T-dot-com forward slash energy.
Related Posts
{"items" : [
{"name":"share","enabled":true,"desc":"<strong>Share</strong>","mobdesc":"Share","options":[ {"name":"facebook","url":"https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3a%2f%2fwww.spglobal.com%2fcommodityinsights%2fen%2fci%2fpodcasts%2fenergy%2fnew-entrants-the-prosumer-potential-force-evolving-renewables-landscape.html","enabled":true},{"name":"twitter","url":"https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.spglobal.com%2fcommodityinsights%2fen%2fci%2fpodcasts%2fenergy%2fnew-entrants-the-prosumer-potential-force-evolving-renewables-landscape.html&text=EnergyCents+-+Ep+31%3a+New+entrants%3a+The+%e2%80%98prosumer%e2%80%99+as+potential+force+in+evolving+renewables+landscape+%7c+S%26P+Global","enabled":true},{"name":"linkedin","url":"https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.spglobal.com%2fcommodityinsights%2fen%2fci%2fpodcasts%2fenergy%2fnew-entrants-the-prosumer-potential-force-evolving-renewables-landscape.html","enabled":true},{"name":"email","url":"?subject=EnergyCents - Ep 31: New entrants: The ‘prosumer’ as potential force in evolving renewables landscape | S&P Global&body=http%3a%2f%2fwww.spglobal.com%2fcommodityinsights%2fen%2fci%2fpodcasts%2fenergy%2fnew-entrants-the-prosumer-potential-force-evolving-renewables-landscape.html","enabled":true},{"name":"whatsapp","url":"https://api.whatsapp.com/send?text=EnergyCents+-+Ep+31%3a+New+entrants%3a+The+%e2%80%98prosumer%e2%80%99+as+potential+force+in+evolving+renewables+landscape+%7c+S%26P+Global http%3a%2f%2fwww.spglobal.com%2fcommodityinsights%2fen%2fci%2fpodcasts%2fenergy%2fnew-entrants-the-prosumer-potential-force-evolving-renewables-landscape.html","enabled":true}]}, {"name":"rtt","enabled":true,"mobdesc":"Top"}
]}