Can Everyone Go Electric? (Without Rebuilding the Grid...)

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1:09hello and welcome to another episode of the everything electric podcast now coming today from australia although i am in the uk so i'm slightly jealous because uh it's very cold in the UK and it's extraordinarily warm in Australia at the moment but today's guest is works for Ausgrid which is the large grid network that delivers electricity and also kind of takes in supplies from rooftop solar from big solar farms from wind farms from energy storage systems from pumped hydro and coal and gas yes still but much much less um and it's a fascinating the reason i'm just i think it's worth if you don't live in australia and you have nothing to do with australia it's worth watching simply because what is going taking place there is kind of giving us a clue as to how we will adapt our grids to cope with enormous increases in electricity demand particularly from data centers interestingly that's the main challenge for the global grid at the moment it's not electric cars electric cars that make very little impact but data centers literally beat the living daylights out of our electricity grid and the way we generate and use power so we should be very aware that anyone who waffles on about how amazing data centers are needs to be pummeled as well anyway that's just my own beef um but it is fascinating to see what is happening there and how quickly it's changing it's so rapid it's so incredibly the shift is happening so quickly just before we start i just want to say do please subscribe to the everything electric podcast it's not like it costs you any money it doesn't cost you anything and it makes a huge difference to us that would be really good and also if you tell your friends family and And particularly if you have an annoying uncle or cousin or neighbour or that person at work who goes on about, you know, you know, you know, I don't want to be boring about it.

3:18But any effort that you can spread the word really helps us. And we are, this is a really rapidly growing channel and we're doing some amazing things. And we're going to see some incredible new technology and new systems around the world. And it's a really exciting time. and it does affect all of us even if you're not interested in that what what where the electricity comes from that that makes your light work or your fridge operate it is actually going to affect all of us in both positive and negative ways as all change does enough philosophy let's get on with the show please welcome to the everything electric podcast tim jarrett from Oscar it our three free youtube channels on evs and clean energy tech are funded by our fun packed test drive tastic events in the north west and greater london and our events down under next up everything electric sydney 2026 plus check out everything electric dot store for merch and much more tim thank you so much for taking time to do this this is an area that i think is going to become a hot topic around the world uh you know in the next few years and it's really interesting what you're doing in australia can you just do the base because i know you worked in the uk for the national grid before that can you do sort of brief potted history and then explain what osgrid is osgrid how do you say i suppose you say osgrid don't you yes it's osgrid uh no robin it's great to join you thank you for having me on the show um so my background is i've been in australia for the last couple of years with Ausgrid as the group executive for market development and strategy, now external affairs and strategy.

5:01And before that, I was at National Grid, split between the UK and the US for about eight years before that. And as many of your listeners will know, National Grid does the transmission and electricity distribution in a good chunk of the UK and also owns lots of distribution and transmission assets, both gas and electric in New England and New York State. But then Ausgrid, can you explain what Ausgrid is? Because it isn't really exactly the same as the national grid in the UK, is it? No, absolutely. Ausgrid is a distribution network that covers the area from Sydney all the way through what's called the Central Coast up to Newcastle, which is further in New South Wales up the coast, and then goes into the Hunter Valley, which is a large kind of agricultural area.

5:52Also lots of coal mining, lots of wineries as well. Yeah. So, I mean, it's actually a lot of people. I mean, in terms of population density in Australia, that's about the densest bit, isn't it? I mean, it's a hell of a lot of people in that area. Yeah, we are the largest network by assets and by population in Australia. Right. But then what's changing so noticeably? noticeably and i mean that isn't i mean i briefly mentioned rooftop solar i can remember at least 15 years ago being aware of the the high level of of penetration of rooftop solar in australia i mean it was a thing a long time ago now it's incredible uh and the with the advent of batteries as well but that that i was slow on the update this is something you will have been thinking about for years.

6:41I had solar panels 15 plus years ago. And then I went, oh, wait a minute, this is different to a big coal burning power plant or a big gas plant or a nuclear plant that you generate next to the coast or on a river. And then you send that electricity, sometimes hundreds of miles to where it's being used. That's how we built the grid in a sense, and now it's changing. And that's what's so fascinating is how we cope with that change, because I don't know what the capacity of rooftop solar is in Australia when it's a sunny day in the middle of the day, but it's a lot, isn't it, now? Yes, I think the rooftop solar revolution and the way Australia's leading the way is what really attracted me to come over here from the UK because Australia is world-leading when it comes to residential rooftop solar.

7:32If you look at the national electricity market in Australia, it's somewhere between a third and about 40 percent of households have have solar on their roof which is phenomenal um and that's really um you know accelerated started about 10 15 years ago but it's been accelerating over over the last few years and it's really changed the dynamics of the network and how we as a network operator have to think you know previously it was very much one-way traffic as you said from very large power generation units largely coal in this country and it pushed the power down, stepped down through the voltages till it arrived in people's homes.

8:11And it was very much a one-directional flow. Now, with this huge abundance of rooftop solar, we're seeing both sort of people generating a lot of what they need themselves, but also exporting back into the grid and converting one-way flows into two-way flows. And I think I'll end up doing a lot of kind of road analogies through this conversation, But it's very much like having, you know, one-way traffic, you know, one-way streets suddenly having to become two-way. And you have to really think as a network operator, how do you let flows reverse? How do you manage that at different times of the day?

8:47And also, I mean, the other thing that I visited when I was in Australia recently was the New England solar farm near Urala. I'm saying all the names wrong, but a very big solar farm that they built on, literally under one of the connections between Queensland and New South Wales. I mean, a huge load of pylons and wires, and that's how they're locking into it. But I mean, the fact that you're suddenly getting big power inputs from places that would never have been a coal-burning power plant, and it's a sheep farm. You know, it's a completely different sort of area. So, I mean, I'm assuming there's lots and lots of challenges, which I know as an engineer, you know, you're excited about.

9:32But I mean, it's got to be complicated to deal with these changes. Absolutely. And the kind of shape of the grid is changing because until not that long ago, New South Wales could rely on seven, eight coal fired power stations dotted around the state. Generally speaking, they were at or very near the coast. So you could also access water from lakes and things like that. and that was it that's all you really needed and now the number of places where power is being put into the network is increasing massively and of course we are just the distribution network going up to 132 000 volts you have transgrid which spans the state at the transmission level and a lot of these sites are also connecting to their network too so it's an incredibly complicated setup now going from i say a number of power jet stations you could count with pretty much two hands maybe some feet every now and then, but you're now moving into a world that are hundreds if not thousands of different generation sites.

10:28But I mean, so the thing I love is the missing middle. So that argument about the missing middle and so you've got the big power connections, which is in a sense that bit I understand in relation to the UK is that all the people I've spoken to, and yet these will be your former colleagues in the national grid, I said there's not a problem with the national grid, the actual infrastructure that carries large amounts of power up and down and across the country can cope with these changes. It's the bits, it's the edge bits, as I'd call them, from the big pylon and the big substation down to the local substation down to your house.

11:06That stuff, is that where most of the complication is rather than the very big wires going interstate or around this country? I think it's slightly different because Osgrade is very fortunate. We have quite a lot of spare capacity in our distribution network. Right. Well, as I said, I think some of the issues in Australia is due to this changing shape of the network, whereas the replacement of the large-scale coal units is being driven by what they call renewable energy zones over here, which are large areas of the country which have been designated as areas for wind and solar. And these have required large amounts of transmission infrastructure to be built in order to get the power that will be generated in these regions out of them and then to the big load centres.

11:49So in New South Wales, that's very much Sydney, up the coast of Newcastle and down to Wollongong. That's where the vast, vast majority of the population lives. It's where the vast majority of industrial and economic activity is. And so actually, there's quite a big issue in terms of changing the shape of the grid there by building this transmission. And actually, it's quite similar to the way the UK's having to wire up the North Sea because of the large amounts of offshore wind that's required. The UK's gone from being a sort of a north-south transmission network to have to bring in the east-west element that way.

12:18And also the way the UK is also having to bring in these HVDC links from Scotland down into the south of England in order to bring that power that's generated in Scotland. So I think grids all around the world are having to change shape at that transmission level and that sort of the higher voltage levels to bring these new sources of supply on. And at the lower voltage level, then it really depends on kind of the history of how much capacity was built in previous generations, where population growths happened, so on and so forth. of that really dictates what happens at the local level on the ground yeah yeah i mean i mean i suppose the problem there is the cost and the time it takes to do that i mean that because i'm i'm what it feels like when you when you look at it is the you know individuals said oh i want solar on my roof and they all put solar on the rise and then more and more and more and more did and there and in a sense the the network the grid network that has to deal with that was was behind the curve is that it would that be an unfair thing to say you know that it's kind of hang on we've got really a lot of power coming off these roofs at midday no that's the real issue at the middle of the day when um if you're in a residential area with lots of solar on the roofs if people at work people at school so on and so forth you haven't got much load soaking it up during the day so people are exporting and what that means is you get kind of over voltages and other challenges on the network in terms of the management because there's basically too much spare power sloshing around with nowhere to go and so various things are being trialed across the country and different networks to try and manage this and we've got some trials at the moment where we're looking at dynamic network pricing so the prices change during the day for the actual cost of the network in order to encourage people to use more of their own solar so you know as i said a lot of road analogies but it's a bit like dynamic road pricing as um congestion goes up as traffic goes up charge more to encourage people to to um make alternative choices and if there is a lot you can do i think you know australia as you know is a very suburban um society that actually if people are able to shift load into the middle of the day whether it's the dishwasher the washing machine if you're fortunate enough to have a pool a pool pump things like that actually you can soak up a lot more of this excess power it's just trying to encourage that consumer behavior to switch to switch to the middle of the day rather than put the dishwasher on at night when you go to bed yes yes i mean it's a change of habit isn't it i mean it is so different to hear because i mean i was in sydney when it was 40 degrees not long ago and i was in an apartment that we you know that we were using and i had the air conditioning on all day because i couldn't cope you know and it was so boiling hot so that you know those but that's where it's it's very different to here in the sense that that would also have been the peak solar generation time was was when the air conditioning was on it's those peaks and troughs sort of follow each other in a way don't they they do the tricky thing is when you get into a very hot evening and overnight yeah so the air conditioning still going the sun's gone down and that's where you have some we see some real really big peaks in terms of what people are pulling through the network in order to keep their air conditioning going and obviously that's where things like storage will start to play a bigger role soaking up excess power during the day and then being able to release it through the night to support air conditioning another another load yeah well it's the two things i mean that the one thing that has happened that is just staggering is the amount of uptake of the current government battery subsidy scheme because i think it's gone past 200 000 domestic batteries hasn't it i think it's there or there about certainly um the figures i saw for the first six months was 155 000 installs but again they were happening so quickly we're talking about a thousand to 1300 installs a day so trying to keep keep track of it but uh and the government has kind of reloaded the scheme so it's now i think 7.2 billion dollars wow to about 2030 so huge um uh support for that from the government and a huge uptake from the population but i mean are you seeing any uh is it possible to see uh a reduction in the amount of solar going into the grid because it's going into people's batteries is that is that red can you register that on a dial somewhere um again it's this is when you start getting have to get very granular and almost looking at this is zone by zone basis because our network is split up into several hundred zones and each one zone substation and all the power fans out that way and so different areas have very different uh responses so right you know if you're in the middle of sydney where most people are apartment dwelling generally speaking they don't have space to put a battery in so we don't see much right in the center of sydney right obviously if you go further out into the more suburban areas where the battery uptake has been higher then we'll we will start to see more impact but it's quite early days i suspect um by the back end of 2026 we'll have a much clearer picture of the impact of the batteries right on the network and how we manage it

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18:07Because what I think the thing is as well that our original infrastructure was built around huge power being generated, as we were saying, in one of, you know, a half a dozen places. And what you're now seeing, and so, because I think I've been thinking along the lines of, oh, we've got to add more massive strings of pylons with very, very high voltage connections. But actually, it's more like, well, I'm asking, is it more like hundreds of slightly smaller connections is what we need and lower voltage and lower power connections? Yes, I think fundamentally a lot of it comes down to what is your view and what actually happens long-term for demand?

18:48because if you're a techno-optimist and data centres absolutely gangbusters, then you're going to need everything. And what we've been doing in New South Wales is, Osgo, we've been working with the other networks in the States to say, actually, can we take a slightly different view to planning and thinking about what's possible? In the past, most countries, certainly the ones I've experienced, the UK, US, planning is very much a top-down approach. And by that, I mean it starts at very big generation assets, coal in the past, gas, nuclear, and designs a system and then pushes the power down to the local level.

19:28And that very much follows that one directional grid design from the past where it's very big, you know, units generating hundreds of megawatts, if not gigawatts of power, and then pushing it down the voltages. And that is still the predominant sort of mentality when you talk about planning today. If you speak to grid planners in lots of countries, they're still sort of thinking in these very big units. And they have to very much so as they think about the transition, because suddenly they're saying, well, I'm going to lose several hundred megawatts here because this coal-fired power station is coming off soon.

20:02How can I replace hundreds of megawatts? What can I do? So, therefore, that's what leads you down the path of thinking about renewable energy zones where you're looking for hundreds of megawatts of renewables to replace the large amount of coal coming off the system. What we want to do as a group of three distribution networks in New South Wales is take a different approach and say, actually, if you step back and start at the grid edge and plan from the zones of distribution network back to the middle, back to the transmission, what sort of system, what sort of could the system look like? And actually, if you can combine top down and bottom up planning, surely that's got to be better for a lower cost system and one that's kind of quicker and better for consumers.

20:46if we take that view. So we wanted to try and add that dimension to the debate in New South Wales. And so we set up what we called a distribution system plan for New South Wales, which we launched at the end of November last year in 2025. And the idea of that was to say, well, if you really maximise the potential of the distribution network and the distribution infrastructure, what could you do? What benefits could that bring? And it's had some really interesting insights and things that we're feeding into the conversation now. Yeah. Right. I mean, presumably, there's got to be a big economic argument in that.

21:21I mean, in that to build a massive sort of interstate electricity connection is very expensive, but building hundreds of little ones, I mean, are there savings to be made from a purely economic standpoint? Certainly, we think that if you take a distribution-led approach or add a distribution-led approach to the current planet, there is definitely benefits in terms of billions of dollars of benefit that can come through to consumers. But I think there's also other aspects to it that help maybe some of the slightly less quantitative benefits. One is definitely around de-risking the transition, because what we're seeing with a lot of these very large transmission projects in Australia, and we're seeing this the same around the world, Australia is far from unique here, is that costs are going up and also delays are coming in.

22:13And so if you're looking to retire coal and replace it with large-scale renewables, you need to be certain that those renewables will come online and the power will be able to be moved to the load centres. but at the moment we are seeing delays and the government here has just extended the life of the araring coal-fired power station to 2029 because of some of this uncertainty and so again one of our arguments is if you take a distribution-led approach to do more at the local level you can help de-risk some of these larger transmission projects and these are projects you're probably still going to need and as i said earlier you've got that view of kind of techno-optimism how much power you're going to need with data centers e-v's and everything um but if you can de-risk it by getting more power into the system quicker then you've got time to allow for cost overruns and delays i think there's another key point as well as around sort of fairness and equity between urban areas and suburban and rural areas that a big part of the debate here is uh people living out in the bush well away from the cities feel that most of the impact is on them and that they are hosting these renewable energy zones they're hosting the transmission infrastructure and all the hassle that goes with building them you know all the construction and so on and so forth they're having all that not seeing much of the benefit and all the power is going to sydney and going to the other other big cities and again i think if the distribution networks and the urban suburban areas can do more do more and generate more themselves that does help show that the cities are kind of trying to to pull their own weight and support this transition because like a lot of the issue you get it's a bit like a high-speed rail people can have high-speed rail whizzing through past their back door but actually the next station is you know tens hundreds of kilometers away these trains don't stop and i think a lot of this transmission infrastructure can feel a bit like that out in the outback that they're hosting it but they're not getting the benefit so again if If the more can be done locally, that's a great way of trying to even up some of that perceived discrepancies.

24:20Yeah. But then the other thing is, I mean, like I started talking about, you know, I didn't even consider it. But the amount of rooftop solar is essentially on the homes of not necessarily wealthy or millionaire people, but, you know, people who've got a house and they've got somewhere off the street to park a car which they can charge. And they've got solar panels. they've probably now got batteries as well. And if you're renting an apartment in the middle of Sydney, you can't do any of that. You can't benefit from any of that. And that's, again, a universal problem. I mean, that's not specific to Australia.

24:54It's the same here. No, absolutely. And I think this is, again, there's a lot of interesting issues around equity and fairness around the transition that need to be addressed. And again, I think because Australia is really leading the way on rooftop solar and starting to push through with batteries, as we just mentioned, we're starting to see some of that happen potentially a little bit earlier than other countries but i think all countries need to be aware of these issues and maybe i'll just give you a few facts to try and help explain this but yeah in in our territory we serve about 1.8 million uh kind of customer connections so about 4 million people 75 of those live in and around sydney so really kind of dense urban areas just under half of the people we have in sydney are in apartments and about a third to 40 percent of renting so again if you don't have access to a roof you're in an apartment so you don't have much spare space for the battery in um actually it's very hard to put solar you know get access solar get access to a battery you often don't have a driveway to park an ev it's also worth noting sydney is one of the most affluent has some of the most affluent areas of australia in it but also has some of the most um impoverished areas two of our local government authority areas are within the bottom 20 across the whole of australia in terms of incomes and income and inequality those sort of factors and again if you're living paycheck to paycheck it's very hard to raise the money for several thousand dollars worth of solar pv or batteries um even if you've you know even if you've got the house and got access to the roof yeah and again it's also worth remembering that not all roofs are suitable lots are shaded some of them don't have structural integrity so even if you are relatively well off and have the spare money you may not be able to get up on your roof so actually yeah what i'm trying to say on in uh is that we're in a danger of getting into a sort of haves and have not situation where somewhere between 40 50 percent of the population can access all the interesting um kit for the transition for doing it themselves whether it's an ev it's battery um uh whether it's solar on the roof they can potentially electrify their whole life because you know we've had numerous studies in australia showing that you will save thousands of dollars if you get off gas at home electrify your car electrify cooking electrify your house puts all on the roof but often those reports miss the fact that you have to spend quite a lot of capital up front in order to invest in the kit so we do have this risk of bifurcating into kind of say the haves and have-nots where you're going to people who can afford it got the space got the cash they can live a very nice lifestyle very uh attractive economically very low emissions actually it's very good whereas those who can't are now bearing a lot more of the burden of the transition they can't access the stuff and therefore i think this sort of sense of injustice and uh inequity will rise yeah i mean what one of the things i i remember reading about when I was in Australia and it's in it's in our notes here was about community batteries because that is one way that you can sort of you could possibly allow a small area of a city with a dense pop you know dense housing to benefit from you know being able to charge that battery from cheap solar in the middle of the day and then sell it for less in the evening I mean is that something that's happening I mean I've definitely seen a couple of community batteries but they actually were in suburban areas now think about it but is any of that happening in the sort of more densely populated areas yes with yes uh community batteries is a kind of program we're looking at and other networks are are too in order to be able to soak up excess power during the day and then redistribute it during the evening so allowing people to knock um a chunk off their bills uh from that uh it's it's again it's i think it's a key point to know that networks are actually the part of the whole system which actually has to deal with every single customer because part of being a regulated monopoly is we don't pick and choose you know everyone who your customers are to our grid so whether they are the richest people or people in low-income housing everyone connects and therefore we really appreciate and understand our responsibility to serve the whole community and trying to come up with schemes and ideas like community batteries and other things we're testing are ways to try and improve fairness, increase the kind of the equity element of the transition, make sure more people have access to it.

29:25Yeah, because I mean, yeah, I mean, curbside charging as well. You know, that's one thing that London, I think, is probably ahead of Australia in. Just in London, there are now it's tens of thousands of effectively curbside on old Victorian lampposts mostly. But they're really, I mean, I've used a couple of them in London. They're very commonly used. And they're really simple to use. That's the thing that I like. You plug your car in, there is a QR code, you blip that, you pay for it. The cost is much lower than a rapid charger. You charge your car overnight on the street. So it's not a perfect solution, but it is a solution.

30:04And I know quite a few people, two of our presenters have electric cars and they can't park them off the street. They're parked on the street and they cope one way or another. But is that something that's growing in Australia? Yes, it's starting to come through. And we obviously, as you can imagine, as a poles and wires company, we have an awful lot of poles and we do the street lighting as well. So that's definitely an area we're looking at a great deal. And it's an interesting area where it's less attractive to commercial charging operators because they probably only get one or two people connected during the day.

30:38So it's very hard to get the throughput. but it's generally speaking low voltage, so it's not large amounts of electricity going into the cars. So again, it's an area where the distribution networks can help fill a gap in the market and fill a need that customers have. Those who don't have access to off-street parking, how can they find somewhere to charge their cars? And again, it's another example of trying to come up with ideas that can help serve as much of the population as possible in order to be able to support them. um i think it's just one of those kind of comparisons with moving to australia is the fact that uh when i got here i thought you know the cars would be driven an awful lot further but actually the average australian car doesn't go much further than the average uk car because it's such urban suburban dwelling and so most people only really need to charge once a week if they've got an inv and again that's where curbside charging can help they just need to find that space for one evening one night and then they're good but the other thing is i mean the cost of batteries.

31:39So when I visited the solar farm a few weeks ago, they're putting in, I think, 400 or 1 ,200 megawatt hours of storage, which they said five years ago would have been a ridiculous proposition economically. It would have been just too expensive to do. They wouldn't do it. But because the price of batteries has come down so much, and is that something you're seeing reflected in sort of longer term planning that you wouldn't have, like 10 years ago, you wouldn't have considered putting huge battery packs in because it was just stupidly expensive. But now it's becoming more feasible. Is that the case?

32:14Well, I think batteries are going to be the biggest change to the network that we see. And that's all the way through. So whether that's at large scale, grid scale batteries, which are replacing sort of certainly challenging kind of coal and gas peakers at that high tens of megawatts, if not hundreds of megawatt level at the transmission or sub-transmission level, all the way down to what's going on in the home, as we've seen with the cheaper home battery program here. You know, people, because of the subsidy, are really looking at batteries and the economics and actually often over-speccing what they actually need for their home in order to get to do it.

32:52And again, I think maybe just to give you some figures to help explain the power of batteries, and these are from last year, and I think as we go through this year, we'll start to get even cheaper. But if you're able to access solar on your roof in Australia, you're advertising the cost of what you know the kit you put on the roof and the inverter and things you're looking about six cents a kilowatt hour into your home for the life of that solar by paying off the costs so that's sort of 3p in the uk for us cents it's that sort of um uh that sort of order and that's basically directly consuming what's coming up your roof you know if you're able to put a battery in there now and you've got home storage um just pay off the cost of the battery and the solar you're looking at the high teens so 18 19 aussie cents a kilowatt hour so about 9 10p and again that is very very cheap when you consider that the fully loaded cost of kind of the average consumer who just pulls their power from the grid works at about 40 cents a kilowatt hour during the year yeah so again back to that point if you can afford to buy the to make the capital outlay to buy the kit initially you're actually really going to see major, major savings.

33:59And again, so again, if you start sharing power between the people in the street and in the neighbourhood, there's some significant savings to come if it can be organised and managed properly. Yes, yes. And I mean, presumably, at that level, you're not having to put in massive new wires in that community. I mean, what you've got there already can cope with the to's and fro's. I mean, obviously, the more that the house itself can consume the electricity coming off the roof, the better from your point of view, in the sense that you're not having to deal with big surges in the local grid. Would that be accurate?

34:35Absolutely, yeah. So, you know, as a network operator, you don't want big surges either way. You don't want loads suddenly spiking up and pulling power off the grid, into the home or into the premises. And vice versa, you don't want them suddenly pushing a whole lot of power into the local network, which has got nowhere to go, where you can't see what can soak it up. So, again, anything that can smooth out that is ideal. And that's where batteries at the local level are great. So, you know, we talked about the community batteries earlier being a great way to soak up excess power and give cost savings to customers.

35:12But those sort of batteries, which are now being located next to zone substations, are really helpful to sort of manage out some of the peaks and help just smooth out the operation of the grid. And I think as more and more of those get rolled out, that will really help grid management. And as you said, use more of the infrastructure we've got already rather than have to build new stuff. Because, again, it's very much like trying to manage the road networks better. You put traffic lights up to manage flows. In all the motorways, they do variable speed limits to manage how much capacity can go down.

35:46It's the same sort of thinking, but just in a poles and wires setup. Right. It's electrons, not cars, I suppose. That's the thing. But that's one thing we haven't mentioned. And I think we're going to see that. I think it's been delayed for so long, but I do believe it's now starting to actually become a reality is vehicle to grid and vehicle to home and that stuff. You know, I first heard about, I remember going to see a vehicle-to-grid demonstration, I think, in 2012. So a long time ago. So, you know, and I've been waiting ever since. But there are some demonstration projects, aren't there, or some early projects in Australia?

36:23I think in Victoria, actually. But is that something that you're thinking about and planning around? Yes, it's definitely something we are considering quite actively. We've actually put our first V2G charger in one of our depots, just so we can learn more about it and see how it works with some of our own electric vehicles. I think certainly people are testing it out in Australia and thinking about it, as you said, down in Victoria. It'll start becoming a lot more important, I think, as the number of EVs rise. I think it's important for listeners to realise that Australia, although it's really leading in rooftop solar, is actually behind quite a few other countries in terms of EV uptake.

37:01it's starting to change now um but uh it's certainly not where um kind of uk western europe california is but i think now that people are seeing how much power they're generating from the roofs and thinking well what can i do with it putting it into your own car lowering the cost of your transport will will make a huge difference and then once the evs start to um become more ubiquitous then i think v2g will be one of those follow-up considerations um yeah the only thing i would say is i think it'd be very interesting to see how much it's actually vtg versus vehicle to home um yeah and just running their own lives and taking themselves sort of off the network as opposed to pushing power back in because i think people there's still a great sense of awareness about someone else controlling your battery and you might want to leap in the car and drive a long way yeah yeah the battery doesn't have have that capacity so i think there's still some of those consumer um hurdles to cross but it's definitely a topic we're considering yeah yeah um i'm just looking at my notes now is this because i mean it's such a it's such a you know you're you're so used to this and i'm i'm like scratching at the very edge trying to understand it because it's such a complicated it's such a big complicated thing that the but but it is it is that it is a transition, it does feel like quite a big change.

38:24Would I be wrong in saying that, you know, that in terms of, you know, the history of the human consumption of electricity, what we're going through at the moment is a kind of paradigm shift. It's not just a bit of additional technology. It's really quite a, it requires a new way of thinking about it. I think, yeah, it's an interesting question. I think, yes, in the sense that in the past, people didn't have to actually think about electricity much beyond can they pay the bill and if they flick the switch do the lights come on at home yeah i think now with this preponderance of uh what they call consumer energy resources out here cdr as the rest of the world calls it um right they have to get a lot more active in their thoughts about um and they're thinking about what they do you know do they put soil on the roof do they take up the kind of government scheme to put a battery in the home if they do how big is it going to be i think you know lots of people are actually thinking do i stay on gas for cooking and hot water whereas if i'm generating all this power from the roof wouldn't it be cheaper long term to have electric hot water heating cook on electric hob those sort of things so people have to make a lot more decisions they didn't have to make in the past so i think from that point of view yes it definitely is a it's a big change also i think a lot of business models are going to start changing in terms of who actually owns the assets and how they're used because you know i was out in back in london uh last year for climate week uh when octopus launched their their um scheme with byd for that uh i think it was 300 pounds and all your you know everything was included everything's free yes it always sounds too good to be true and the only provider back to our vg conversation you have to plug the car in i think 20 nights a month and for a certain period of time to allow them to use the battery but But because you don't own the car, you're just renting transport, renting the car.

40:16People's opinions and views about the ownership and whether they mind that battery being used will change quite dramatically. And I think that will happen with a lot of things, you know, things like home storage and solar. And I think collectively, also, we have to think a lot more carefully about how we make the most of what we've got in the local area. I think it's another area that we're very keen to investigate at Osgrid is how can we access a lot of the unused roof space. So to give you some figures, Committee for Sydney, which is a kind of think tank that looks at the economic development of Sydney, has done some work that we supported recently looking at if you really pushed all the roof space in Sydney, how much power could you generate?

41:00and again very stretchy and again there's a lot of assumptions but they think that you could get to almost three quarters of sydney's annual power needs could be generated within sydney if you took it to that extreme level of really finding all the available roof space putting solar putting the batteries to soak it up and it just shows you what is possible if you really take a different approach and a different mentality to both kind of power generation power storage and power consumption yeah i mean the other big advantage of that is you're not distributing that electricity over hundreds of miles of wires out in the bush i mean that's that whole thing happens within the city well yeah that's exactly where the cost comes so to give you some more numbers that if you the cost that people pay for their kind of kilowatt hour um just for the network cost so that's the transmission and distribution cost is about 13 cents a kilowatt hour on average through the year right so even if that's the transmission that's not generating that is literally just the electrons going along a wire yeah that's the cost of the road um if you put it that way even if the power is generated for absolutely free in the hunter valley center or over the blue mountains the cost of getting it to the household or the business in um sydney somewhere around 13 cents a kilowatt hour so that's just the cost whereas i said earlier if you can generate it and consume it locally that cost should drop significantly and that's again one of the things we're looking at is trying to change the how we think about pricing because currently when it was just big coal-fired power stations generating assets everyone had to pay the same um transport charge because everyone's getting the same electron basically um whereas now an electron that's generated on a roof and consumes down the street really shouldn't have to pay this full um network charge because it's a tiny bit of um of the um tiny bit of wire so again how we think about network pricing is going to become a really important challenge as we go forward right and making sure that the amount of um the kind of charge people are seeing is commensurate with the where the kind of journey the electron's gone on right that is really interesting so i'm really fascinated by this from the point of view of other countries around the world i mean are you do you Do grid operators from other countries ever come and see what you're doing here?